Keith Jarrett
The Melody At Night With You

I press play, but it's not a game, or rather, it's not the kaleidoscopic, baroque, and pyrotechnic game of a Koln Concert or a Vienna Concert. Nor is it the uncontainable Bachian effervescence of the trio that takes us, with its magic carpet, just below the jazz stars. None of this.

I press play. And a long farewell begins, a journey to the end of the night done on tiptoe, gliding over a keyboard of snow, barely illuminated by the moon.

It's Jarrett's moon, the one that reveals, like never before, the filigree of small things, daily, domestic. Always seen and never recognized. Jarrett's moon, which stirs, without any grandeur, the tide of the soul.

An immediately shy Jarrett, never so mute, fragile, naked, but never so brazen. Perhaps because he is in love. Desperately in love with the woman who just left him and to whom he dedicates the album. Physically exhausted: they call it "chronic fatigue syndrome". A via crucis made of stations passing from the couch, to the bed, and to the piano of his ranch immersed in American nature.

Immodestly loving pieces, summarized in the enigmatic circularity of the dedication: "To Rose Anne, who heard the music. And then returned it to me". Rose Anne who is his wife. Never heard a Jarrett like this. A sigh of notes for a handful of standards ranging from Gershwin to Duke Ellington, masterfully revisited in what is actually a single heartbreaking piece. Never so close to the silences and unspoken words of Thelonious. Never so far from Monk's extroverted and playful phrases.

A beautiful love letter sent to anyone who wants to read it.