Keith Jarrett

CD version. The Melody at Night, with You is perhaps the most intimate album Keith Jarrett ever made, ten solo piano readings of jazz ballads and folk songs recorded at home. Released by ECM in October 1999, it was made while he was slowly recovering from a long illness. In place of the long improvisations of his solo concerts, he plays the melodies almost as written, with great care and very little ornament.

Jarrett had been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and for more than a year could not rehearse, perform or record. In 1997 he sat down in his home studio and taped several songs on cassette as a gift for his wife, Rose Anne. Those recordings became the starting point of the album. ECM gives 1998 as the recording year, at Cavelight Studio, his studio in rural New Jersey. Jarrett engineered the sessions himself and produced the album with Manfred Eicher. The booklet carries his dedication to Rose Anne, "who heard the music, then gave it back to me".

The songs come from George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern and Oscar Levant, alongside the traditional My Wild Irish Rose and Shenandoah, unusual choices for a jazz pianist. I Loves You Porgy opens the disc with notable restraint. Only on Ellington's I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good does he open up into a longer, cascading solo. Levant's Blame It on My Youth leads into an improvised Meditation built on a dark repeating figure in the bass, which ECM's notes liken to a church bell at midnight.

In DownBeat in December 1999, John Ephland gave the album four stars and called the music "exquisite, unnerving and disarming, as the virtuoso bypasses flourish". Chris Parker, in BBC Music Magazine, described it as "state-of-the-art solo piano music" packed with details that emerge only on repeated listening. Not every critic agreed, and some found the plain treatment too subdued. Jarrett had once said of his first Bach recordings that "this music doesn't need my help", and the same attitude runs through these songs.

CD, ECM 1675, first released by ECM Records in 1999.