Keith Jarrett has captivated audiences worldwide for over 60 years now. After a brief spell in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the pianist rose to prominence as a member of Charles Lloyd quartet before joining Miles Davis's infamous group, whom he helped propel jazz into the uncharted sonic worlds or rock-jazz. Together with the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the recently departed bassist Garry Peacock – ‘The Standards Trio’ as it became known – Jarrett is celebrated for exploring the creative possibilities that the trio format afforded, inspiring generations of young artists in a way that had been unparalleled in jazz since the trio performances of the Bill Evans groups. Outside jazz circles, Jarrett is arguably most widely known for his solo concerts and, although he has frequently performed music from the Western art musical traditions, he achieved stardom with his impromptu improvisations, which include the best-selling piano solo album ever recorded in jazz, The Köln Concert (1975). Those who had the chance to witness this remarkably gifted pianist would consider themselves privileged, and those of us who haven't will lament the missed opportunity; in October 2020 Jarrett communicated that he had suffered a stroke and will most likely not be able to perform again (Chinen Reference Chinen2020). This makes Keith Jarrett: A Biography a sadly timely study, not least because of Jarrett's recent announcement, but also because jazz musicians and critics alike have long advocated for more scholarly work to be conducted on living and active jazz musicians. Jon Christensen, the drummer in Jarrett's influential European quartet of the 1970s, passed away in February 2020. Three members of Jarrett's ground-breaking American quartet of the 1970s, the saxophonist Dewey Redman, the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Paul Motian, all major figures in modern jazz, have passed on too.

This study by Wolfgang Sandner will attract both praise and criticism for its author's interaction with the pianist himself. Is this an authorised or an unauthorised biography? I suspect the latter, but I could never quite tell. In his introduction the author admits that his relationship with Jarrett has declined for some time now; understandably, perhaps, Jarrett was annoyed at the writer's assertion that The Köln Concert was one of the pianist's greatest performances. Jarrett is known for his idiosyncrasy as a performer but the persistence of commentators in celebrating The Köln Concert as one of his best performances behoves us to be sceptical. At the invitation of Vera Branders, a 17-year-old part-time promoter, on 24 January 1975, Jarrett played a solo concert at the Opera house in Cologne in front of a full audience which was recorded at a minimal cost and with limited equipment (a Telefunken M5 tape recorder, a small mixing desk and two Neumann U67 microphones). Because of fatigue and the poor quality of the instrument available to him, Jarrett needed some convincing to perform the concert. As a result, like much jazz, the recording is celebrated for the triumph of the genius over adversity, which in itself merits thorough examination. Sandner is clearly a fan of the music and The Köln Concert features prominently in this volume, but the lack of critical engagement with the reception of this album will be lamented.

I suspect this book has been authored with a broader readership in mind. Scholars of jazz will almost certainly find the book interesting and frustrating in varying measures. Besides the little methodological clarity included here, the discussion often resorts to descriptions of ‘great men’ in which Jarrett comes across as an undisputable genius. The discussion of music is likened to that of the analysis of classical music. We learn that ‘The way Jarrett […] builds up his improvisation in motivic-thematic steps […] is extraordinarily impressive’ (p. 31). In accounting for The Köln Concert – a work the author clearly adores – Sandner writes: ‘Thematic entities, leitmotifs, developments, reprises, variations and rondo forms are juggled with such sovereignty and brought together in such proportional adequacy that it almost sounds as if Jarrett had created a musical blueprint for the concert beforehand’ (p. 125). Readers knowledgeable about jazz historiography will immediately understand the repercussions of such writing: the debate concerning the inappropriateness of using analytical methods, language and criteria evolved for the examination of Western art music for the investigation of jazz has been one of the most treacherous areas of jazz studies. I do not intend to be too critical of the author here: I too find the music itself important enough to merit intelligent observation and jazz scholars have yet to come up with a better way of accounting for it. However, the issue is augmented with the sheer abundance of references to artists from the cinematic, visual and literary worlds (from Andrei Tarkowski and Pablo Picasso to Jack Kerouak and Giorgos Seferis). In attempting to situate the work of Jarrett within the artistic world that he emerged from, my impression is that we get to know more about Sandner, a musicologist whose diverse expertise includes Miles Davis, Arvo Pärt, and Heiner Goebbels, than about Keith Jarrett.

Essentially a ‘life and works’ book, this study includes interesting historical information of the pianist's upbringing and his collaborations. The author balances well the access he was permitted to Jarrett and at times he does not steer away from sensitive, private matters. Sandner's spotlight on the relationship between Jarrett with Manfred Eicher, the founder of the Edition of Contemporary Records (ECM), highlights the influential collaboration between the two. The comprehensive discography at the end will be useful to some. Given that so much audio-visual footage survives of Jarrett's playing, it is a shame that the author does not examine any live performances. All in all, admirers of Jarrett's music will find that this volume complements previous work on the pianist, which includes Peter Elsdon's The Köln Concert (Reference Elsdon2013), Ian Carr's earlier work Keith Jarrett: The Man and his Music (Reference Carr1991), as well as Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation, a documentary directed by Michael Dibb (Reference Dibb2005). Detractors will question the validity of some of the information presented here because of the lack of references. Some will find solace in the fact that the volume has been translated from German to English by Chris Jarrett, the younger sibling of Keith and a successful pianist himself.