Keith Jarret J.S. BACH The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1

A previously unreleased live concert recording of Keith Jarrett performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 is out now. The live concert was recorded in March 1987 at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in New York state, a venue renowned for its beautiful acoustics. Keith Jarrett’s studio recording of JS Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier was made one month before the live concert recording, in February 1987, and was the first in a series of his acclaimed Bach recordings.

When the studio album was released, Jarrett’s manner in these iconic preludes and fugues surprised many listeners with its poetic restraint. Jarrett said, “When I play Bach, I do not hear the music, I hear almost the process of thought.” The pianist was deeply attuned to what he called “the process of thought” in Bach; by not imposing his personality unduly on the music, Jarrett allowed every note of the score to come through via the natural lyricism of the contrapuntal melodic lines, the dance-like pulse of the rhythmic flow. These qualities are strikingly apparent in Keith Jarrett’s live recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier, with its added electricity of a concert performance. Jarrett always points out that Bach was an improviser and, in some ways, Jarrett’s genius as an improviser brings him closer in spirit to the composer.

“These are performances in which tempos, phrasing, articulation and the execution of ornaments are convincing,” wrote Gramophone of Keith Jarrett’s first recorded account of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. “Both instrument and performer serve as unobtrusive media through which the music emerges without enhancement.”