GROWING INTO THE SILENCE

By Michael Walsh

ONSTAGE, KEITH JARRETT belies his cerebral, prickly reputation. Swept up in the trancelike flow of his jazz improvisations, he levitates from the piano stool like Jerry Lee Lewis, head thrust back and howling with pleasure. Beneath his fluid fingers, the keyboard ripples spontaneously, spinning out an endless series of riffs and variations, while his lyrical bassist, Gary Peacock, and elegant drummer, Jack DeJohnette, match him move for move. Heads nod approvingly as the melody is handed off from instrument to instrument, three men doing what they love best: making music with hand and heart.

Jarrett's tour this month across the U.S. finds the once and future enfant terrible at the top of his form and, perhaps, the peak of his career. In addition to performing live concerts in seven cities, Jarrett, 50, is simultaneously releasing a six-CD set, Keith Jarrett at the Blue Note, featuring his trio's nuanced performances of jazz standards. His "classical" repertoire, moreover, encompasses music from Bach to Bartok; last summer he performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Boston Symphony, and he has just released a disc of suites for keyboard by Handel. Always a difficult composer to pigeonhole--he is scornful of minimalism, which his music sometimes resembles, and calls New Age music, which some profess to hear adumbrated in his solo improvisations, "Jell-O"--the protean Jarrett seems not only more successful but also more elusive than ever.

Which is fine with him, for Jarrett has long been an outspoken critic of the music business's preference for image over art. In a pungent 1992 article for the New York Times, he obliquely blasted Branford Marsalis for selling out to the Tonight Show and generally laid waste to the music scene. "John Coltrane could not have led a television band," he complained.

Jarrett's uncompromising career took off in the mid-1970s with his seminal solo-improvisation concerts in Europe--with 2 1/2 million copies sold, his 1975 album, The Koln Concert, is the best-selling solo-piano album ever. "Music should be thought of as the desire for an ecstatic relationship to life," explains the former disciple of the mystic philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff. "Music has to have a deep joy inside it."

A native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Jarrett (who is of Hungarian and Scottish-Irish extraction, not African-American, as some have supposed from his appearance) began giving piano recitals in his hometown at the age of seven. He turned down a chance to study in Paris with the late Nadia Boulanger, teacher of three generations of American composers. "It wasn't a casual 'No,'" he recalls. "I was developing a way with music that would be better off minus the labels on everything, minus the descriptions, minus the analysis."

Instead, Jarrett, who also plays the saxophone, recorder, drums and numerous other instruments, chose a year of jazz study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and then apprenticed himself to a series of cold-water flats and smoky New York City jazz clubs. He got a break in the mid-1960s by sitting in with saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk; that was followed by gigs with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis and eventually a solo career, encouraged by German record producer Manfred Eicher, who recorded the young Jarrett on the fledgling ECM label in 1971, and has produced his records ever since.

Whether Jarrett is performing Bach (his 1989 recording of the Goldberg Variations is the finest since Glenn Gould's), conjuring from absolute silence a half-hour improvisation or dashing through a standard like Autumn Leaves, his playing is marked by a clean, crystalline piano sound, a keen musical intelligence and a technique that can handle just about anything a composer throws at him--or he throws at himself. Jarrett thinks in musical paragraphs, his phrases arching across not only measures but also minutes, a quality that equally suits both bebop and baroque.

Jarrett's free-floating intellectual mixture of animism (he cites the chirping of crickets and the singing of birds among his inspirations) and transcendentalism can become precious. His 1986 recording Spirits, which he made alone in his studio at his home in rural New Jersey, is a self-indulgent multicultural exercise in Pakistani flute puffing, Indian tabla thumping and soprano-sax wailing, while his avant-garde collaborations with sax player Jan Garbarek, such as Luminessence, test not only a listener's ears but his patience as well.

At his best, however, Jarrett can penetrate the psyche and the heart in a way few other contemporary musicians can. The Book of Ways, an extended suite for clavichord recorded in 1987, is one of the most original compositions of the late 20th century, while his 1992 recording of Dmitri Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues is unmatched in its lucidity and attention to telling detail. "I start in silence, and then I have to grow into the silence. That is how the music comes to me," he says. In his performances, Jarrett reaches for the stars, and if he sometimes comes up only with dust, it is often stardust.

--With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/Oxford, New Jersey

With reporting by DANIEL S. LEVY/OXFORD, NEW JERSEY