Sitting in the sultry autumn sunlight outside his home, deep in the New Jersey countryside, Keith Jarrett looks the picture of health and vitality. As he talks, energetically emphasising the occasional point with a nod of the head or a hand gesture, there’s no hint that this is a man whose musical career nearly ended in the autumn of 1996, when he was diagnosed as suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome.

That year had been one of his most productive, not only involving his extended improvised solo concerts, but a world tour with his Standards Trio, and an exemplary recording of three Mozart piano concertos, conducted by his friend Dennis Russell Davies.

From the sudden, dramatic onset of his illness, it was more than two years before he was able successfully to perform in public again. Even then, he lived in constant fear of a relapse. It is only now, almost six years after his collapse, that he is approaching his former level of activity and consistent artistic brilliance, with the release today of Always Let Me Go, a double album by his trio, and his first solo concert for three years at the Metropolitan Music Hall in Tokyo on Wednesday. This will also be his 150th concert in Japan, and one that is likely to be played entirely differently from the way he used to tackle such an event.

“When I got sick,” he says, “I listened to a lot of my old stuff. I had so much time on my hands there wasn’t much else to do, and I didn’t know at that stage if I would ever play again. Half of what I heard struck me as ridiculously poor. I didn’t like a lot of my long introductions, and there were lots of things I wasn’t happy with about my touch. My illness gave me an opportunity that very few musicians have, to re-evaluate everything. I wanted to reconnect to the idea of sounding like a horn — a trumpet or saxophone.

“I’ve been aiming at the perfection of timing that Miles Davis would have. He came in so perfectly on the beat that even drummers were envious. Likewise, Charlie Parker could hint at a flurry of notes, but by not playing all of them, and sounding some more loudly than others, he gave the impression of doing more than he actually did. In trying to recapture these things in my own playing, I think I’m getting towards the essence of jazz, where you draw a veil over part of what you do, and leave something hidden and mysterious, rather than putting all your wares out front in the way someone like Oscar Peterson does.”

I wondered if being unwell had actually changed his entire technique, so that his return to form was not just a question of what he played, but how he tackled it.

“Absolutely. Because when I was sick I became so weak that I had to figure out my touch all over again. Remember, I didn’t play a piano for over a year — almost a year and a half, in fact. In a way I suppose I was lucky, because I had to start again at the beginning, and in doing so I discovered ways of playing I might not otherwise have investigated.”

The first signs of his recovery came in the delicate solo album, The Melody at Night With You, which Jarrett produced and recorded himself during 1999. This was swiftly followed by Whisper Not, a muscular, dramatic, trio set, recorded in Paris at the close of a short run of European concerts, in which he, the bassist Gary Peacock and the drummer Jack DeJohnette tackle the standard repertoire with typical panache. Jarrett reckons he played with such abandon because it was the end of the tour, and he had to keep nothing in reserve.

“It was more than that,” he grins. “The piano was an absolute bull. It was so stiff, that for it to sound at all fluid is a miracle. It was a completely hard instrument to play, and I feel that my achievement was to pull out of it what I did.”

As it turns out, Whisper Not is — despite the Standards Trio’s name — its last full-length exploration of jazz standards to have appeared on disc. Beginning tentatively last year with his disc Inside Out and now expanded on his new full-scale double album, Jarrett has encouraged his colleagues to emulate his approach to solo concerts, and to play free improvisations, with no preparation and no formal structures.

“Being sick was an incredible wake-up call as to who I am,” he says, his voice becoming more emphatic. “I feel committed to playing, because I know how fragile life can be, and I wanted to follow up something I had felt long before I became ill, which was my interest in having no rules about what comes next. Our decision to play free stuff came about when we were on a long flight and I just blurted out to Jack and Gary that maybe we’d do this. It hadn’t occurred to me before that moment. We’re now in our twentieth year of playing together, and this is the kind of decision you don’t come to unless you implicitly trust the others. But I figured it was time to share with the trio a challenge I set myself on every solo concert. That is firstly to come up with good music, and secondly, not to come up with good music I’ve come up with before. Believe me, the second is the bigger of those challenges.”


Always Let Me Go is released by ECM today

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