Oregon Music News

UPDATE: Ramsey Embick’s CD release is on Tuesday, December 1, 6:30pm at Jimmy Mak’s $3

Current conventional thinking goes like this, “I’ve run out of ideas, I think I’ll do an album of standards.”

And then you run across something like Ramsey Embick’s Extended Shelf Life, a solo piano recording which is worth all the rest of the time you might spend wading through all the other albums of standards.

Ramsey Embick

Even though he’s had much success, as the Musical Director for the Pointer Sisters, producer, engineer and player in Los Angeles, he has remained the one great undiscovered jazz pianist in Portland, even though he has played all over town for years.

Don’t get me wrong, all of the musicians know and appreciate him.

This album is flawless, beautiful, thoughtful and like Betty Carter’s work, the fact that he’s playing a standard is irrelevant. He makes you listen with new ears.

Yes, there will be comparisons to Bill Evans. He even does A Remark You Made, but even a cursory listening sets Embick apart.

Perhaps this album will broaden his audience. The other night at the Heathman, when he played with singer Shelly Rudolph the room was packed. It was an exquisite combination.

Listen to Green and Pale

Pianist Keith Jarrett began playing improvised solo concerts in Germany in the early 1970s, although he traces their roots to recitals he gave when he was a young boy (he says 6 or 7 years of age) for the Allentown, PA Women’s club.

This three-disc set documents two 2008 concerts, one at Paris’s Salle Pleyel on November 26, and the other at London’s Royal Festival Hall on December 1. That’s nearly three hours of music.

In the accompanying booklet, he explains in sometimes painful detail the events in his personal life that led up to these concerts: a debilitating two years of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, an on-and-off marriage that ended in her leaving him (after having left him two other times over a four year period).

These concerts are the first public performances after the emotionally bloodied Jarrett emerged. He needed to lose himself in his work, and that he did.

In some of the most revealing liner notes in history, he also says that,  “It is not natural to sit at a piano, bring no material, clear your mind completely of musical ideas and play something that is of lasting value and brand new.” But that’s what he has always done.

The liner notes are a treasure of artistic self-awareness. “The (London) concert went on and, though the beginning was a dark, searching, multi-tonal melodic triumph, by the end it somehow became a throbbing, never-to-be-repeated pulsing rock band of a concert (unless it was a church service, in which case, Hallelujah!).”

This is all ammunition for Jarrett detractors. The self-awareness turns into self-absorption,  and the accompanying  emotional outpouring at the piano is just what annoys the people who have always been annoyed with Keith Jarrett.

So if you wore out two or three copies of the Koln Concert, you’ll welcome this. It is easy to lose yourself in Jarrett’s explorations. I’m in that camp.

He is older, perhaps wiser, chastened, inspired and most of all….he’s Keith Jarrett.

Well, yes there are those sounds he makes when he plays and you either love them, put up with them,  or run screaming from the room, but there do seem to be fewer of them here. You gotta admit the headline grabbed ya.

Listen to part of the London Concert