In the Music, Keith Jarrett Finds He Can Still Fly Free

Keith Jarrett’s remarkable musical odyssey returns to UCLA’s Royce Hall on Thursday night. The gifted pianist--an artist whose appeal crosses all boundaries--is making a rare appearance, his schedule kept to a minimum of carefully chosen dates, their frequency limited by his continuing treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome.

In fact, his last appearance in Los Angeles, in February 1999, was followed by a serious relapse.

“That concert and the travel in California,” says Steve Cloud, Jarrett’s manager, “caused a relapse which forced us to cancel sold-out concerts and a return to La Scala in Italy.”

Jarrett recovered to do concerts--with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette--in Paris that summer, performances that resulted in the trio’s current two-CD release, “Whisper Not.” But a pair of solo concerts in Japan that followed in the fall were apparently less successful.

“They were a series of brief tunes, but not like the performances on ‘The Melody at Night, With You’ [a much-praised solo album recorded in Jarrett’s home studio and released a year ago],” says Cloud. “And Keith decided that solo was not going to be part of what he’s doing for an indefinite part of time.”

Nor, for that matter, will classical performances or composing.

“None of those areas are being worked on,” Cloud says. “But we’ve decided, life being a potentially fragile process, to record numerous live concerts over the last year. We’re going to record in Newark on the 25th at a new hall that has superb acoustics. We recorded in Carnegie Hall, and we recorded three concerts in Europe. So we now have six or seven concerts in the can, all great, all releasable.”

Jarrett’s focus on performing with the trio has not, however, meant any reduction in creative development. And in the course of the trio’s live concertizing, a fascinating new area of exploration has begun to open up.

“In the concerts in Europe that were recorded, they played entire sets freely--I mean 45 minutes of completely improvised, free music,” says Cloud. “The next recording following this current release may be something taken from London or Montreux with a good deal--almost half, in fact--consisting of totally free playing--no tunes, just playing. The first night in London, in particular, was quite remarkable. So it’s possible that, just as the trio and Keith seem to have arrived at the absolute zenith of translating standards, that we’ll put out a recording that isn’t that kind of music. But we just haven’t decided yet, so stay tuned.”

Will some of those freely improvised passages surface Thursday during the concert at Royce?

“It’s spontaneous and always a possibility,” says Cloud, “if the room, the instrument and the way they feel all come together, but it’s completely dependent upon whatever is happening in the room that night, or on any given night.”

And dependent, as well, upon Jarrett’s physical condition, because he continues to undergo a difficult and complicated treatment plan to deal with his chronic fatigue syndrome.

The plan, according to Cloud, is based on the premise that chronic fatigue syndrome is associated with bacteria; it involves antibiotics, nutrients, and vitamins and herbs to counterbalance the effect of the antibiotics.

“It’s a fairly complex protocol, and the traveling part becomes problematic because of the need for the precision in administering in relationship to meals, and so forth,” he adds. “It’s hard to pull off when he’s on tour, and it requires ever-more adjustment with time zone changes. The whole process creates unknowns and other changes that become potential sources of stress, and stress is the ultimate culprit in terms of the system.”

But the good news is that the treatment appears to be resulting in gradual but continuing improvement.

“Keith was clearly stronger this year than he was last year,” says Cloud, “and stronger in ’99 than ‘98, so there clearly has been an improvement. The traveling part of his career is still problematic, but the playing part has been fine.”

* Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette perform at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Thursday. The concert is sold out.

In Print: The jazz books keep coming, with few areas of America’s music remaining untouched by extensive literary scrutiny. Here are some of the latest arrivals:

* “Swing Under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom,” by Mike Zwerin (Cooper Square Press, $27.95). Zwerin, the longtime music critic of the International Herald Tribune, takes a look at one of the more unusual periods in jazz history, and comes up with a fascinating glimpse of those who played--including the Jewish group the Ghetto Swingers--and listened to jazz during the Hitler era.

* “Living the Jazz Life,” by W. Royal Stokes (Oxford University Press, $27.50). Profiles of 40 major jazz artists, from swing players such as Louis Bellson and boppers such as Jackie McLean to current stars Regina Carter, Cyrus Chestnut and Diana Krall, written by a veteran Washington, D.C., jazz critic.

* “The Oxford Companion to Jazz,” edited by Bill Kirchner (Oxford University Press, $49.95). A massive, 850-page compendium that attempts to review the entire art form via more than 60 essays by observers and journalists from around the world (this writer included). There are individual biographies of virtually every major jazz artist--from Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton to John Coltrane and Miles Davis--as well as overviews of stylistic genres, instrumental categories and the impact of jazz upon American culture and its interaction with music from other parts of the globe.

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Freelance writer Don Heckman writes about jazz for The Times. He can be reached at djh@earthlink.net.