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Rating: In 1983, the prestigious German record label ECM, led by Manfred Eicher, released the first album of the Keith Jarrett Trio: Standards Volume 1, launching a group that would significantly influence the history of modern jazz.
Today, twenty years later, their fifteenth album "Up For It" is released, representing a sort of celebration of their intense activity.
It is a live recording from their performance last July at the Antibes Jazz Festival, a place Jarrett loves to visit quite regularly (14 times since 1966). It's a unique live recording, experienced with the uncertainty of rain, as depicted in the beautiful photo inside the booklet, showing the trio performing protected by unsightly yet very useful plastic tarps.
The album contains seven jazz classics and an original track, "Up For It," complementing "Autumn Leaves." Some might turn up their noses at yet another album of standards, but that would be a grave mistake, because the album presents an extraordinary freshness in the interpretations of these classics.
Indeed, starting from well-known themes such as "If I Were A Bell," "My Funny Valentine," and "Someday My Prince Will Come," the trio manages to develop and evolve new, free, and wonderful sounds.
If I had to choose a term to describe the trio's music in "Up For It," I would say it is fluid, because it flows light, clean, linear, and without hitches, without ever being predictable. It seems to arise from nothing, becoming, step by step, inescapably alive.
The themes are presented with the usual brilliance - Gary Peacock's bass solo in Butch & Butch is fantastic - transforming into a continuum where each of the protagonists performs their role excellently.
An album to take and listen to with eyes closed.
Tracklist
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