Beyond Keith Jarrett

A part of someone's Keith Jarrett collection

I finally got my hands on a printed programme for the Wellington Jazz Festival while in town yesterday. Looking through it, I came across the name of Marcin Wasilewski, a Polish jazz pianist who features on both of the albums I have by French drummer Manu Katché. The first of these albums, Neighbourhood, also features Tomasz Stanko and one-time Keith Jarrett collaborator Jan Garbarek, which is what got me interested in Katché in the first place. Anyway, Wasilewski is appearing with Tunisian vocalist and oudist Dhafer Youssef on Saturday before the Tomasz Stanko concert. I decided I had to go to this as well, so I went into Ticketek and handed over another $55. That's three concerts I'm going to in Wellington this weekend, all at the same venue. If I'd booked them together I would have qualified for a 10% discount, plus I would have saved $12 in booking fees. Never mind. Incidentally, Wasilewski has played with Stanko a lot over the years, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he shows up in the latter's quartet on the night.

Manu Katché is one of the artists I started listening to a few years ago after I decided that my fascination with Keith Jarrett was bordering on the unhealthy and that I should try to broaden my musical horizons. Having said that, I'd found a genre I really liked (understated, melodic, romantic piano jazz, for want of a better description), and I didn’t want to stray too far from that. So I started by checking out other musicians in this genre, as well as some of the pianists who'd influenced Keith Jarrett.

My first port of call was Bill Evans. Evans played piano and cowrote some of the music on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, considered by many to be both the best-selling jazz album of all time and the greatest jazz album of all time. He later went on to revolutionize the piano trio concept. He did this by giving the bassist and drummer more active roles, resulting in more interplay among the musicians. Keiko had a copy of The Bill Evans Album, featuring Eddie Gomez on bass and Marty Morell on drums, so I started listening to this and grew to like it a lot. On some of the tracks Evans plays a Rhodes electric piano, then a relatively new instrument. For this reason some critics have dismissed the album as "gimmicky", but the music is great and it's still one of my favourite Bill Evans trio albums.

Among the collection of CDs my brother Mark left behind when he went overseas was a compilation of Bill Evans tracks called Quiet Now, which served as my introduction to Evans's non-trio recordings, including his solo work (including Conversations With Myself and Further Conversations With Myself, in which he used overdubbing to layer up to three tracks of piano on each song), and his duo work with guitarist Jim Hall. My own collection of Bill Evans CDs now numbers around ten. Last Christmas Mark gave me The Legendary Sessions CD, which includes Evans's two collaborative efforts with Tony Bennett, The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album and Together Again, listening to which has helped me overcome my aversion to jazz vocalists.

Other pianists who've been described as having influenced Keith Jarrett and whose music I listen to fairly regularly include Ahmad Jamal and McCoy Tyner. I never really got into Oscar Peterson. I've liked some of what I've heard of Bud Powell, and am interested in hearing more. The same goes for Thelonious Monk.

Some of the pianists I've enjoyed listening to over the years who've undoubtedly been influenced by Keith Jarrett are Tord Gustavsen, John Taylor, Bobo Stenson, and Eliane Elias, although I've pretty much lost interest in Gustavsen, whose playing sounds a bit monotonous to my ears, and the only work of Elias I've heard to date that I really like is on Shades of Jade, an album credited to bassist (and Elias's husband) Marc Johnson. Johnson, by the way, was once a member of the Bills Evans Trio. (Don’t you just love those connections?) Elias recently released an album of Bill Evans tunes, although I'm too scared to listen to it because she sings on some of the tracks. New Zealand pianists in my collection include Mike Nock and Alan Broadbent.

Since I'm going to a concert of his on Sunday evening, I should also mention Brad Mehldau. Mehldau is often compared to Keith Jarrett, although according to some Jarrett fans the similarities are overstated. I must admit I've heard very little of Mehldau. I have listened to a CD he made with guitarist Pat Metheny, but I've only heard snippets of his solo and trio work.

Last year I branched out further and started listening to quite a bit of jazz ensemble music, mostly of the genre known as hard bop. The catalyst for this was seeing a performance by a sextet led by saxophonist Oyama Hideo at Someday, a jazz club in Tokyo. The highlight of the evening was a performance of "This is for Albert" from the Art Blakey album Caravan. Back in New Zealand, I got hold of Caravan and also checked out some of Art Blakey's other work. I gradually built up a small collection of Jazz Messengers albums, mostly from the period in the 1960s when the group featured Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.

Blakey had a close affinity with Japan. He gave several of his sons Japanese first names. He was one of the first overseas jazz musicians to tour that country, an experience he later described as follows:

"When we hit Japan in 1960 or 61, I never saw anything like it. There were 7,000 heads going up and down at the same time and humming every note of everything we played… When we first went to Japan, they had Lee Morgan shirts, Wayne Shorter overcoats, all that kind of stuff in the department stores. The same kind of publicity the Beatles got in the U.S., we got in Japan, and plus. I think we're the only American artists that had an audience with the emperor. But this country never said a word about it, never a word."

Another classic hard-bop album I listen to a lot is Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth.

I've always had a soft spot for John Coltrane, and have four or five of his albums, including the magnificent A Love Supreme. Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come is another jazz saxophone favourite. The title is a bit of a misnomer. Although he's regarded as a pioneer of free jazz, Coleman's playing on The Shape of Jazz to Come is very melodic and the music quite orthodox, especially compared to something like Coltrane's Olatunji Concert. I hope to add to my Ornette Coleman collection in the future.

Distance walked today: 3km
Total distance walked since Tokaido training began: 73.9km
Days left until departure: 75