Listening to the Deer Head

I like listening to most things by Keith Jarrett. Really do. The guy can essentially play anything that comes to mind with great passion and skill. Sometimes he can get a little too out, and I am not always in the mood for his tendency to mouth his notes the way he does at times, but when he is on, the guy smokes.

I guess the saddest thing about Keith is his rather enfant terrible stage persona, known to castigate his audience directly and anything else that bothers him indirectly via the microphone in his apparently long spoken introductions at concerts. I have been reading more and more about his rather difficult tendencies as of late, and it makes me reticent to see the guy perform. At least until I listen to something like At The Deer Head Inn with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian in tow. The opening cut, an 11+ minute rendition of Miles's Solar is worth it alone. This stuff is the sound of close friends at the local speakeasy having a conversation and something smooth in a tumbler with ice, and chain smoking until dawn.

Which I guess is appropriate, since At The Deer Head was a small such speakeasy where Jarrett had done some of his first live work there in his mid-teens. He reconvened there 3 decades later to "re-christen" the club after a generational change in ownership. Good on him.