Keith Jarrett
Personal Mountains

Before, everything was simpler. There were records, covers, tapes, and compact discs. Before, there was surprise; you could discover an album or a band, even by chance. Maybe we were also more ignorant. Someone would record something for you, assuring you it was the most fantastic album in history, and maybe it was a dud. Maybe not. But you put the record on and slowly immersed yourself in it.

Now there are samples, broadband, and finally, public domain on albums that even those who made them forgot... but the surprise? It must have been about ten years since I recorded this album. It was the last days before getting my license, and with the Vespa, it was freezing cold. I'd come home with a CD in my pocket and a broken cassette borrowed from a friend. That evening, he proudly handed me the CD of 'Afro Blue Impressions,' and as I left, I also requisitioned this cassette from his kitchen stereo. “I listen to it in the morning, it relaxes me,” he had told me.

Only later did I get to know Keith Jarrett's music a bit better, discovering that, in reality, "Personal Mountains" is the recording of a concert held in Tokyo in '79 by his Scandinavian quartet (Jarrett, Garbarek, Danielsson, Christensen), just over a sneak peek at "Nude Ants." A sort of... reverse appendix, kept hidden in the ECM archives for ten years before being released. Yet a nearly magical alchemy hovers over everything, a thread that ties the performances together and crystallizes them into a precise and unrepeatable moment. There's unity of intent, synthesis capability, and a kind of enchanted wonder that accompanies the performance, framed by an unreal silence and the sporadic applause of the audience. An album that, if not better, is certainly different from "Nude Ants." The open, spacious voice of Garbarek's sax floats through the dense percussive fabric of the compositions, painting with an impressionistic touch the changes and movements of the soul, jumps, climbs, precipices. Mountains, personal mountains indeed. A plaintive prelude of double bass precedes the phrase that winds through “Prism,” taken up and expanded by the piano, and anchored by the deep voice of the tenor sax that precedes the elegant solo of Jarrett's piano, in which inventiveness and formal perfection blend with astonishing efficacy. Cymbals and drums underscore the delicate dissonances of the slow and twilight “Oasis,” with the melancholic sax phrase condensed into a few minutes, leaving you with the impression that if Kenny Barron had written “Sun Shower” on a rainy day, perhaps, it might have sounded like this: rainy, autumnal.

But the atmosphere continues to be tense, the sax nervous and the piano light, ethereal, as if hanging on to the rhythmic base. The tension only eases a little with the subsequent “Innocence”, in which a very sweet soprano introduction sets the theme, played this time on the major mode and with attention to expression and accents, highlighted by the powerful voice of the sax and the rhythm section. Here, as elsewhere in the album, the percussive vocation of the quartet is more focused on highlighting and developing the natural flow of improvisation and thoughts, less obsessive than in "Nude Ants." Only at the end does the light blues “Late Night Willie” bring the concert back to a light-hearted and carefree dimension, with the freshness and playful stride of a finger exercise, good for lightening the mind, and the heart.

Yet, by the end of the album, the initial 16 minutes of the psychoanalytic “Personal Mountains” continue to dig in your mind, with that nervous and ragged sax phrase growing uncontrollably, swaying, overflowing over the percussive base, leaving behind a sense of unease that even the mild ending can't erase. One thing I still don't get... how did that friend of mine manage to relax with this record, beats me.