Up for It is a concert by the Standards Trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, recorded on 16 July 2002 at the Festival de Jazz d'Antibes in Juan-les-Pins. ECM released it in May 2003 to mark twenty years of the trio as a working band. It was a rainy night on the Riviera, and Jarrett's liner notes describe the music as "swinging in the rain".
The circumstances were far from ideal. Jarrett writes of a waterlogged piano and a wet audience, yet adds that "when we were on stage, in the middle of the music, nothing else mattered." The concert took place at La Pinède Gould during the festival's 42nd edition. It came after two albums, Inside Out and Always Let Me Go, on which the trio had pushed far into free playing, and it returns to the world of standards. Martin Pearson engineered the recording and Manfred Eicher is credited as executive producer. The seven tracks run to about seventy-three minutes, most of them past the nine-minute mark, which leaves the trio room to stretch.
The programme mixes four standards with two bebop pieces and one surprise, and three of the tunes were new to the group's discography. If I Were a Bell opens in a relaxed mood, followed by Oliver Nelson's Butch & Butch, and later comes Charlie Parker's Scrapple from the Apple. The surprise is John Lewis's Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West, a sparse, stop-and-go blues that suits Jarrett's growing taste for economy. Writing in Weltwoche, Peter Rüedi noted that the introduction to My Funny Valentine was unlike anything Jarrett had played before, although he had often performed the song. The closing Autumn Leaves turns into Up for It, Jarrett's own vamp of about eight minutes built on three semitones.
In the International Herald Tribune, Mike Zwerin wrote that "rarely has collective improvisation been on such a sophisticated and communicative level." For Barry McRae in Jazz Journal International, the album "completes the rehabilitation of Jarrett the piano master" after The Melody at Night, with You and Whisper Not. The German magazine Stereoplay made it CD of the Month, and the French Répertoire its event of the month. Wolfgang Sandner heard in it chamber jazz of the finest kind in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
CD, ECM 1860, recorded live at Juan-les-Pins in July 2002 and first released by ECM Records in 2003.
