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Rating: July 19, 2006.
Keith Jarrett is at the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice. What remains? Not the approximately two hours of music, of listening. In memory, that listening strips away its own worldliness and reveals itself in its essence: a calling. The art of Keith Jarrett calls, dispels the ghost of voluntary activity to explain and make understand (communicate), instead magnetizes the “passivity of our activity”: silences, brings out the dormant, sunken, forgotten sedimentations. What remains of that concert is disorientation, a confusion that the more it is touched by voluntary memory, the more it rarefies. What Jarrett gives to his listener is clarity, in the face of that clarity the feeling is of trembling.
In the anticipation of the concert, I tried to dispel expectations. During the event, the disposition to silently receive was occasionally marred by the expectation of those typical “moments bienheureux”, clusters of beauty that weave the entire musical fabric around them. In the past, Jarrett has gifted many: the opening of the Cologne concert, what happens after 37 minutes and 23 seconds of the Kyoto concert on November 5, 1976 (on “Sun Bear Concerts”), the “smile” that falls between minutes 3.23 and 3.35 of track no. 13 of “Radiance”, or even entire pieces like no. 17 again from “Radiance” (which between 9.29 and 9.36 is reborn inexplicably from itself) or the entire “Concerts” (recorded in Bregenz)…
The last seconds of the third and final encore, like a joke, opened that dimension of disbelief. They are the testimony of that Jarrettian ability to condense in a few seconds such a concentration of what I don't even know how to name: essence, light, beauty… Perhaps it is the last term that is the most suitable: a total and dazzling beauty, one that renders speechless, that tolerates no replies, that calls out the most forgotten parts of oneself. This is the last memory, the clearest and the most confused. A handful of seconds that overshadow an entire unforgettable evening. A handful of seconds, yet directly concerning the substance of the art that Jarrett offered on the evening of July 19.
As for the rest of the sound material, the form remains: a difficult, free, (atonal?) attack, a blues piece, various ballads, swing rhythms, the attack of the reprise after the first pause (one of the most intense moments, a summa of the build-up constituted by the first four sections of the first part of the concert). Everything emerges, draws upon, and disappears in those concluding few seconds. It also overshadows the regret and anger for that fourth encore denied by the usual idiots with repeated flashes.
Ultimately, what remains? The awareness of having faced something incredible, a superior and effective language. The hope of rediscovering, even if only on a plastic disc, that magnificent phenomenon which, once created, disappears from presence: music.
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