Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette

CD version. On Tribute the trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette turned a concert of standards into a set of dedications. Ten of the twelve pieces, recorded live in Cologne in October 1989, are offered to a musician who had made that song their own. The list runs from Lee Konitz and Jim Hall to Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. Two Jarrett originals, one at the end of each disc, complete an evening of almost two hours.

The concert took place on 15 October 1989 at the Kölner Philharmonie, during a European tour that had reached Oslo a week earlier; that date was released in 1995 as Standards in Norway. Manfred Eicher produced, and Jan Erik Kongshaug and Otto Fries recorded it digitally. Jarrett is at the piano, Peacock on double bass and DeJohnette on drums.

Lover Man, for Konitz, opens the first disc on a sombre piano introduction and gives Peacock his first solo of the night. Jarrett slips in a passing quote from The Girl from Ipanema. Solar, for Evans, is fast and tightly wound. Sun Prayer, the first of the originals, builds over fourteen minutes into some of the densest playing of the concert. The second disc turns to ballads, among them Smoke Gets in Your Eyes for Coleman Hawkins. Ballad of the Sad Young Men, for Anita O'Day, rests on DeJohnette's brushes. All the Things You Are, for Rollins, lifts off from a bright piano introduction, and U Dance closes the evening in high spirits.

The singer Nancy Wilson, honoured with Little Girl Blue, and Charlie Parker, honoured with Just in Time, complete the list. Reviewing the album for ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo called Little Girl Blue "gorgeous to the last drop" and judged DeJohnette's drumming "some of the best around". Among the trio's many live albums, it is the one where the choice of material is itself the idea.

This is the double CD edition on ECM Records, ECM 1420/21, in a double jewel case. Tribute was first released in October 1990.