Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  The blues festival is being held in a big open-air metallic structure at a fairgrounds on the edge of town. Like Miami, Jackson is subject to sudden storms, and just before Gregg’s van arrives at the site, a late spring torrent has turned the surrounding area to mud. Looking for a dry place for the interview, Dave Lorry talks Bobby Bland into accommodating some visitors on his homelike bus.

  Seated in the bus’s central room, with his wife Danielle nearby, Gregg isn’t much more talkative than he was in Miami. It isn’t that he’s unfriendly, nor is he unintelligent; it’s more like he’s shy or wary or simply exhausted from twenty years of inquiries. He doesn’t really have much to say about Seven Turns (“It’s a good record; I’m proud of it”), or even about working with the Allmans again (“They’re a fine band; I’m proud to work with them”). Even when he’s talking, Gregg seems to be living someplace inside himself. He gets in and out of answers as quickly and simply as he can. Music is something he plays and sings, rather than talks about, and his life, he makes plain, is off limits. “The private facts of my life are just as private and painful as anybody’s,” he says in his most direct moment. “I don’t enjoy going over that stuff all the time.”

  After a few minutes, Bland comes back to visit with Allman. It is a heartening experience to meet Bobby Bland, to watch and hear him speak. He is probably blues music’s finest living singer—a vocalist as sensual and pain-filled as Frank Sinatra. In addition, he has a transfixing face: big, open, warm, impossibly beautiful and animated. It is a gracious face and he is a gracious man. If there were any justice, Bobby Bland’s image would be celebrated on postage stamps, his bus would be full of Grammys, and he would have the pop audience he has always deserved.

  When Bland takes a seat across from Gregg, Allman’s entire manner changes. He relaxes visibly, puts his feet up on a nearby bench, sinks back into the sofa, and even allows himself a few unguarded smiles. Clearly, these two men like and respect each other. They start by talking about watching the Rolling Stones’ recent live TV broadcast, but it is not Mick Jagger or Keith Richards or even guest guitarist Eric Clapton that they gossip about. What engaged their interest and humor was the appearance of quintessential boogie-bluesman John Lee Hooker onstage with the Stones and Clapton.

  Allman laughs as he recalls the times he has seen Hooker on the blues circuit. “He always has these two big white women with him, both of ’em taller than he is,” says Allman, smiling.

  “Yeah,” says Bland, “John Lee is crazy about them white women.” His face opens up into a gentle leer, and he and Allman share a knowing laugh.

  Bland regards Gregg warmly for a moment then says, “I just wanted to see you were okay. You know, taking care of yourself.” He levels an inquiring look at Gregg.

  Gregg Allman returns the look, and then blushes. “Yeah, man,” he says, “B. B. King gave me the same once-over last night.”

  Bland smiles without embarrassment. “Well, we’re just checking on you,” he says with paternal warmth. “Letting you know we care.”

  For whatever their differences in age, temperament, or cultural and racial background, these two men are colleagues. Bland regards Allman as a fellow traveler on the inescapable blues road. He knows the life Allman has lived. He knows its hopes, and he knows its ends.

  Bland also knows it’s time to let his family come aboard the bus, and get out of the pouring rain. This means, for the moment, the interview is over—after maybe ten minutes. Gregg can’t help looking a bit relieved. “We’ll talk later,” he says. “Right now I’d like to stay and talk with Bobby a little while.”

  Actually, as it turns out, the interview is over for good. Later, Allman simply disappears again. One moment, he and Danielle are seated at the side of the stage, watching Bland’s elegant blues act, and then he is nowhere to be found. He will not be there when the evening’s blues-superstar jam transpires, nor will he meet or hear his idol, Little Milton. When those events take place, Gregg is someplace else—maybe in a darkened motel room, watching TV, brooding.

  But midway through the afternoon, he is true to his vocation, and takes the stage in Jackson, with the rudimentary blues band that backs Wolfman Jack. This isn’t the Allman Brothers, but Gregg remains that band’s spirit, and as he sits behind a Hammond organ, he sings Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” Muddy Waters’ “Trouble No More,” and Sonny Boy Williamson’s “One Way Out” not as if they were tired songs that he has sung for a generation, but as if they were bitter facts that he was just facing in his life. This is not the man who seemed skittish back in Miami, nor is he the relaxed crony who shared ribald laughs with Bobby Bland earlier. No, it is a different man altogether who sits on this stage, before maybe five hundred people, and closing his eyes tight and tilting his head back until his blond hair grazes his shoulders, sings as if his soul depended on it. This man is a blues singer—he sings the music as if it were his birthright, and as if it offers the only moments in which he can work out the mysteries of his life and his confusion. Gregg Allman shuts his eyes very, very tight, and sings like a man who understands that every time he sings, he is singing to ghosts. Maybe he’s trying to make his peace with those ghosts, or maybe he’s just trying to haunt them as much as they have haunted him.

  keith jarrett’s keys to the cosmos

  An itchy silence rules the backstage corridor of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium—a silence just about as bearable as the hush that trails a judge’s gavel at sentencing. Keith Jarrett, thirty-three, a short, curly-headed bundle of muscle, leans in a corner doorway rubbing the bridge of his nose with both hands in a prayerlike motion. Just minutes before, he finished playing the midway date of a worldwide solo piano concert tour, a performance that should easily rank as one of the more florid and sinewy displays of his career. But Jarrett seems heedless of the fact. He has answered the few attempts at congratulations by the backstage party with mutters and glares, and for the moment seems intent on a brooding reverie.

  After several strained moments, Jarrett coughs a sharp, private laugh and scans his guests with an impish grin. “I never realized until now,” he says, resting his stare on me, “how vain and purposeless it would be to attempt to describe what I just did on that stage. I mean, I’m not thinking about the music I just played, I’m thinking about talking to you about the music. Words are a poor substitute for experience, and in order for me to talk about any of this at all, I’m going to have to play games with you.” He pauses to pet the bristly contour of his mustache. “I think it’s totally appropriate that we say nothing now.”

  With that, the itchy silence returns.

  ALTHOUGH HE WOULD probably bridle at the suggestion, Keith Jarrett is to jazz what Jerry Brown is to California politics—a guileful and feisty enigma. Jarrett doesn’t exactly brim with what might be termed straight talk, because, simply, he doesn’t believe his designs to be comprehensible under the myopic lens of Western scrutiny.

  Jarrett, who first won acclaim for his work in Charles Lloyd’s and Miles Davis’ early fusion ensembles, creates music that by all surface criteria is jazz: an improvised form of music rooted in swing rhythms and blues-derived scales. Yet his music also has a strong harmonic similarity to the work of such twentieth-century European composers as Debussy, Bartók, Schönberg, and Stockhausen, which writers and fans alike laud as a union of jazz technique and modern classical theory.

  According to Jarrett, though, it’s nothing of the sort. He asserts that his music is beyond categorization—devoid of will, purpose, influences, or even conscious methods, music that very nearly transcends human processes, and therefore, human considerations.

  Jarrett has often said that when he takes his seat at the piano for a solo concert, he has no idea what his fingers will play, that his entire performance is in fact a “spontaneous composition.” That places what he does outside the usual provinces of improvisation, which generally means extemporizing melodic lines on given themes, harmonic progressions, or modal settings. Jarret
t theoretically constructs his theme and overall structure on the spot, which is hardly as unprecedented or superhuman as some of his supporters claim, but Jarrett pursues it more extensively than anyone else ever has. It is a risky undertaking, and Jarrett’s concerts meander just as often as they enthrall.

  In emphatic contrast to so many of his colleagues who rose to prominence in the last decade—particularly those who, like Jarrett, passed through Miles Davis’ bands—Jarrett has proudly shunned fusion and funk in favor of strictly acoustic settings, including his solo campaign. Of the twenty-five albums or collections he has released in the last five years (comprising forty-three discs), five of those (or eighteen discs’ worth) have been solo piano volumes, a staggering output for any artist, and all the more impressive when one considers how first-rate it’s been.

  The showstopper is Jarrett’s latest release, the Sun Bear Concerts, a ten-record account of his 1976 solo tour of Japan assembled in a booklike slipcase with a suggested retail tag of seventy-five dollars. No one has ever before released a ten-record set of all new music, and it isn’t likely that anyone ever will again—unless it’s Jarrett. His previous solo volumes have sold well enough to border on gold—unusually good for jazz—but Warner Bros. (the distributors for Jarrett’s German-based ECM label) worried about how to promote the bulky Sun Bear. Jarrett undertook a solo tour scheduled expressly to promote his monolith. Spanning New York to Tokyo, it has been his most extensive undertaking to date.

  Releasing a ten-record set doesn’t strike Jarrett as a particularly indulgent act, just as his oft-stated claim that no other composers or jazz artists have influenced his style doesn’t strike him as a conceited or ill-founded boast. In fact, he avidly disavows the merit of most contemporary music other than his own (though he does profess a liking for Linda Ronstadt’s pipes and an occasional Bob Dylan song), and all electronic music, he insists, is poisonous.

  Underscoring Jarrett’s grandiloquence is his temperament. On occasion he can be just plain arrogant. He’s famous for halting concerts to scold late arrivals or berate photographers. Other times, he’s stopped performing until the piano can be retuned to his standards. In short, Jarrett’s music may spring, as he claims, from egoless sources, but his disposition, it would seem, is nothing less than the epitome of an artistic ego—proud and moody.

  JARRETT AND I meet for the first time in New York, the day after his tour opened in mid-October 1978, with a concert at the Metropolitan Opera House (the only other soloist who has ever been invited to play the Met was Vladimir Horowitz). Although I’ve been in the city for four days, Jarrett has had no time for an interview, and when we finally meet, it is in the back seat of a limousine en route to LaGuardia Airport, where he is to leave for Chicago. As we speak, he strokes the handle of a tennis racket and peers through smoky sunglasses at New York’s disappearing skyline.

  “My time is fairly important,” he says in a brittle, clipped cadence, “so I don’t have much of it to spare. Just what did you want to ask?” There’s nothing haughty about his manner, particularly, and nothing intimate. Indeed, it’s about as bald and matter-of-fact as I’ve ever encountered.

  I start by asking him how consciously or analytically he monitors the music as he’s improvising it, how much his own ear dictates what an audience hears.

  “The process is mysterious,” he says evenly, removing his sunglasses and fixing his dark eyes on mine. “That’s the best thing I can say about it.”

  “Surely there are decisions you make in that moment-to-moment process about what notes to play and not to play, and how long and how loud to play them?” I ask.

  He shrugs a smile and half nods his head. “Since it’s all improvised, every second may contain a hundred choices for me, and my first job is to know whether I’m making those choices mentally or not. Like, if my finger is about to play a note, I can’t play it because I want to play it, and yet I can’t not play it because I don’t want to. It’s a course of thought and no thought, decision and no decision.”

  WHEN JARRETT talks about the course of “decision and no decision,” one gets the impression of a man knee-deep in an Oriental discipline, and, in fact, some critics have viewed his music as the proselytizing excesses of a yoga, Sufi, or Zen student. Jarrett does adhere to some kind of stoical code, but what it is, he won’t say. The closest I can place it is Taoism, the Chinese religious and political movement based upon the ancient Tao-te Ching. The idea of Tao translates, roughly, as the “way” or “path,” a driving power and rhythmic force in nature that is life’s ordering principle. It informs and motivates man’s spirit, and when one surrenders to its pulse, one grows in tune with the benign dictates of the universe, becoming a vehicle for its will.

  Wherever Jarrett’s notions of self-propelled music spring from, they’ve certainly come home to roost on the Sun Bear Concerts. Nowhere else in his collected works does music seem more effortless and splendid. From the opening phrase onward, it unfolds like an idyllic dream on the border of consciousness, and like the best of dreams—or narratives—you never want it to end. It is, to my mind, one of the few real self-contained epics in seventies music.

  Jarrett’s improvisations rarely rank as bona fide compositions because they’re usually formless adventures, devoid of identifiable themes, movements, and resolutions. But this is also their strength. Instead of clearly delineated melodic trains, Jarrett focuses on a mood—most effectively in a minor key or mode—then traces it through interminable transitions that just skim the rim of a retainable melody. That he can do it as effectively with atonal structures as he can with blues or impressionist forms merely indicates the expanse of his imagination.

  Probably the most striking feature of Jarrett’s solo music is the degree of intimacy he has with his instrument, which adds an interesting hitch to his claim that music flows of its own will through his blank consciousness. More likely it is a process far less mystifying: Every time Jarrett places his fingers on the keys, he isn’t just opening himself to the whims of a muse, he’s summoning his variegated background as a pianist.

  Jarrett, of French-Hungarian extraction, grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A prodigy, by age fifteen he had consumed a classical repertoire ranging from Bach to Bartók and was attracted to jazz by the Ravel-influenced reveries of pianist Bill Evans. In the early sixties, Jarrett studied improvisation at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he eventually was discharged for insubordination. He played support to almost any Boston and New York club act that would have him (including, most notably, Art Blakey), a practice he now lauds as the prime influence in his eclectic point of view.

  By 1966, Jarrett had settled into Charles Lloyd’s Quartet, who, with their cultivated hippie air and breakthrough shows at the Fillmore, were one of the earliest harbingers of fusion jazz. With them, Jarrett first began to attract an audience for his idiosyncratic flights, including a fondness for pummeling the piano’s interior. His subsequent tenure with Miles Davis was weird and fitful, though he now says that the experience was as positive as he could hope for with electronic music: “It was music that was conceived for electronics. There was no other way of playing what Miles was coming up with.”

  In 1972, everything fell together for Jarrett. His own group—which included bassist Charlie Haden, saxophonist Dewey Redman (alumni of Ornette Coleman groups), and drummer Paul Motian—released two stunning albums: Birth (Atlantic) and Expectations (Columbia), showcasing one of the most protean and irrestrainable quartets of the seventies, featuring a fully ripe Jarrett hammering out complex blues and polytonal fugues with rock-derived fervor. Also that same year, he released his first solo album, Facing You, for a then-obscure, budding German label called ECM (Editions of Contemporary Music), prompting critic Robert Palmer to exult in these pages that, “When he plays alone, Jarrett pushes his creativity to its limits. . . . It is without a doubt the most creative and satisfying solo album of the past few years.”

  After that first solo effort, Keith�
�s heart belonged to ECM—and solo recording. Although his quartet (which had moved to ABC/Impulse) continued to record prolifically—including in a one-year span, three of their finest albums, Fort Yawuh, Death and the Flower, and Treasure Island—they increasingly became a perfunctory, misshapen unit bound together by contractual commitments.

  At ECM, the label’s producer/mentor, Manfred Eicher, allowed Jarrett to record in any style he fancied, from the flawed In the Light (compositions for chamber ensembles) to the sublime three-record Bremen-Lausanne. With Bremen-Lausanne and the subsequent Köln Concert, Jarrett found his niche, freely mixing gospel, impressionist, and atonal flights into a consonant whole.

  While Eicher’s production style is so meticulous and refined that it leaves most ECM artists sounding cold and prosaic, in Jarrett’s case Eicher furnishes the canvas best suited to the artist’s brush. Together, they make some of the most sterling ascetic music of the day. If Keith Jarrett has at last arrived, it hasn’t been alone.

  WHEN JARRETT and I meet again, it’s on the far side of the continent, in the backstage corridor at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. After the show and Jarrett’s terse dictum about the futility of words, a small cluster of nervous admirers files into Jarrett’s dressing room for autographs. Jarrett for the most part is cool but polite with the visitors, who seem to be seeking some meaningful banter or disclosure about the mystery behind his music. Jarrett appears to both relish and reject his role as sage, depending upon the questioner.