You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Keith Jarrett's Intro on ATTYA - #53

Episode Date: November 7, 2018

WOAH! Watch out! In today's episode of You'll Hear It, Peter and Adam explore Keith Jarrett's introduction on tune "All The Things You Are." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam. Hey, Peter, I was just thinking. Hold on. I'm Adam Annis. And I'm Peter Barton. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast. Daily Jazz Advice and Strange Growns coming at you. So there's a reason behind that Strange Grown.

Yeah. We have a voice memo, another speak pipe today. And it was a request for a little bit of a tune analysis. And it's from Keith Jarrett. That was my best. I'm receiving my musical information from the stars. Come on, man. You can do better than that.

No, I thought that was pretty solid. pretty good, but it was not nearly dramatic and obtrusive enough. Have you ever noticed when he gets one of those, when he gets like a really good, whoa, something amazing's about to go down. It's kind of a pre-self, whoa, whoa, you know. All right, so let's check out. This is a speak pipe from John, and let's hear him. Hey, guys, I want to see if you'll do a solo analysis of Keith Jarrett's introduction to all the things you are from his 1989 trio recording called tribute.

The intro is dope, and I'd love to hear what you guys. have to say about it. Thanks so much. Okay, first of all, we'll be the judge of the dopeness level, but I'm not sure it is. Yeah, you know what's cool about this, and what I love about this podcast too is like, I've never heard this record. Yeah, I don't know this one.

I've heard it before, but I don't remember this intro in particular. I know his, all the things you are from live at the Blue Note. Yeah. You know, I know that really, really well. I listened to that hundreds of times. That was like late 80s kind of? Ninety-93, I think. Okay. Was that one? I'm 93-94, I think. But this is from, the album is 1990. He said 89, but the credits say 90, so I'm going to go with the credits.

But I just checked this out, you know, after hearing his speak pipe and, whoa. Whoa, okay. So let's start. He just wants the intro. Let's see if we can just listen to the intro and give our thoughts. All right. Pretty dope. That's fairly dope.

Okay. Yes. Judgment on doptness, affirmative. Man, you know what's great about jazz is like, even when you know how he's, he did it, that's still incredible. It's thrilling. I mean, it's, yeah. And to me, that's the definition of a thrilling performance when

you can take something. I mean, you know, it's one thing to go on this like crazy harmonic journey on an intro. He just played the tune. It's not even really an intro. He just played like eight choruses. He's playing the changes. The most he did was like throw a dominant seven in on a major chord, you know? Yeah, but I mean to make it, and then

when you know where it's going, even though you're not there, but you know it's a trio and what's about to happen. And It's almost like you don't want to leave it because it sounds so good, but you can't wait for that trio to come in because you know that's going to sound good too. Oh, yeah. You know, so basically it's right. So what's cool about this, and we can break it down a little bit from a technical perspective,

but, you know, it's like he's not doing anything super complicated as far as, like, technical-wise, but the way he makes it sound, that requires a lot of great technique. The execution is like is really high level on. a number of different areas from a piano technique standpoint to be able to execute in all those areas. And I would just start with something that's not just piano, but it's so important for this kind of thing, his groove and his time. I was actually tapping along and I'm like, you know, he's playing so confidently within the groove that he's not, he's almost making it sound like he's playing out of time, but he never does.

And I'm tapping. I was like, oh, wow, Adam, you're tapping the same because I heard somebody else. And I realized that was him tapping up. Yeah, he's got it. He's got it all together like that. you know like you said harmonically he's not doing anything you know he's not taking it into the brad meldow version of all the things you are right going way out he's playing the changes he's actually the melody is in there quite a bit yeah i'm not afraid to kind of keep revisiting it either

or giving it away great lesson yeah it never sounds stale yeah and you know i listened to it about four or five times this morning because i was trying to figure out like well how many voices he's doing he's doing mostly four three to four three to five voicings but mostly four yeah He's doing that thing where, you know, he's got the bass. Yeah, kind of modified strideish kind of. The alto and the soprano. And the alto and soprano are often playing in these like sixth or fifths or something. And you could listen to this intro a few times and just pick out that bass.

And it's a great little melody. Or pick out the tenor part where he's like going to da-da-da-dun-dun-bunk-d-d-don. Yeah, yeah. He definitely hears stuff in that range. He loves hearing that stuff. Good stuff. I mean, themes develop in there. And that's really the genius of it is that, like, he's a,

And you know, that's the goal when we're all trying to do something like this. It's develop independent themes, right? Yes. So you're just not laying your hands down or whatever, and he really accomplished that. Well, I think in here, like he often does, especially when he's playing solo, you know, he lays out those really interesting, but super like logical and simple themes in the different registers, but then he resolves them. Like he's a master of like not letting stuff go. And I mean, coming back and saying, giving it the answer,

extending it as needed, it's not just like random little riffs thrown here and there. Like there's a cohesion to it, even as it's very contrapuntal, certainly. And this intro, you know, kind of constantly at a minimum, there's three voices going on that you just hear from the beginning. Like, he introduces that for the beginning. But it's like the context of it really is this. And I was trying to think about like, what is that group? Like he definitely chick Korea influence on this. Like I'm here a lot of chick, but on the groove.

On the groove. and then the kind of the way he arpeggiates, but it's almost a Brazilian, like, kind of almost like a bioni, not really bion, it's like almost a samba. Yeah, yeah, he's hinting at that, you know. I mean, it's not a strict thing, but, I mean, it's just an interesting groove that he kind of sits on,

and he's so confident in it that it's almost like he's playing around it so that it's not too obvious. Yeah, there's definitely a pattern going on between those four voicings, right, where he hits the bass note in a certain spot, and then the tenor, that's all in the left hand. And the alto and soprano kind of thing

are on the right hand doing a lot of stuff in harmony together and then with little, I mean, that's just a very basic breakdown of the structure and then things happen in the middle. They're great. One thing that I noticed, and this is very high level, and he's a master at this, is dynamics. And even though it's not like a broad range of dynamics,

like he never gets super quiet or super loud, but his ability to keep things, even when he wants them, even and bring out things when he wants to bring them out. That takes a lot of work. To have that evenness amongst all four voicings and then to bring out the spots you want to bring out, that is, that's not accidental. Right. I mean, we don't say the word genius around here a lot. We don't throw it around lightly, but it really is knowing, like to keep all that sort of stuff going. And I mean, there's a certain amount of voicing he's doing kind of on-the-fly voicing,

not voicing, but, you know, really voicing in terms of those melodies and stuff that, that's dynamic and then it's even beyond that like kind of different tonal shadings, you know, based upon the register there. Different sounds, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a, there's a lot going on there. And like I say, he's right. He's right. Well, this is fun, man. Hopefully, uh, hopefully it doesn't get taken down because we played about two and a half minutes of it. Uh, but thank you, John, for the suggestion. I'm on that album now because it's so killing. I mean, it's really, really hip. So thank you for that. And, uh, yeah, you know, as a first impression, that is, is pretty dope.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thanks for the question, John, for the suggestion. And everybody, you can go to you'll hear it.com. Come and visit us on the interwebs. We've got T-shirts. We've got a place for you to leave a rating and review. What? Well, you can kind of link over to a little place we call iTunes or Apple Podcast.

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