Jackson: No doubt you don’t like talking about influences.
Jarrett: I can do it. I like to do it. I don’t understand how it works, anyway. Nobody who plays music can actually say why they did something. Is it because somebody else did something? Go ahead, ask me.
Jackson: Would there be Keith Jarrett as we know him, without Bill Evans?
Jarrett: Possibly not. Or Paul Bley, who I met at Berklee. He gave me his album Footloose. I was just a student. I played it a lot. But in the past, Lennie Tristano, I loved his sound. Ahmad [Jamal], y’know?
Jackson: I was going to mention Ahmad, dynamics and timing. You once played “Poinciana” in his style [Whisper Not, ECM, 1999].
Jarrett: According to Jack [DeJohnette], Ahmad said when people ask him who they should listen to in the jazz world, he mentions us. So Jack, Gary and I already loved his white album (Portfolio Of Ahmad Jamal, Argo, 1959), and to some extent, when I was young enough, about 14, [Dave] Brubeck did a solo album that was transcribed, so I got the music, and I played it at home.
Jackson: Did you ever tell him that?
Jarrett: No. But when I heard him live, as a teenager with my parents in Allentown [Pennsylvania], in the only jazz club I ever heard of in Allentown, I got into it. But the last piano teacher I had was from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia — Eleanor Sokoloff. She’s not alive anymore. [Sokoloff died in 2020 at age 106.] But her husband, Vladimir, was famous and was in the piano department, also. She didn’t like me listening to other music: “You’ve got to concentrate on what we are learning here,” and that was all classical.
Lesenswertes Gespräch in down beat:
https://downbeat.com/news/detail/at-home-with-keith-jarrett
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #158 – Piano Jazz 2024 - 19.12.2024 – 20:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba