On July 7, 2013, Keith Jarrett bracingly took to the stage at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy. The momentousness of the occasion was not lost on anyone: just six years earlier, Jarrett had become the first artist to ever be banned from the festival by director Carlo Pagnotta, for delivering a profanity-ridden condemnation of photographers in the audience. Seeking to avoid a similar incident this time around, Pagnotta issued a preemptive plea to the crowd to put their cameras away and to greet Jarrett with a standing ovation.
As the audience stood and complied, Jarrett finally appeared, flanked once again by his longtime trio-mates Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. The atmosphere of camaraderie did not last long, as Jarrett examined the audience for just a few seconds before hastily declaring, “See you later” and walking offstage. There was momentary confusion: surely this could not be a repeat of the 2007 performance, where Jarrett issued his diatribe against the audience before even playing a note. But there was Stephen Cloud, Jarrett’s manager, walking on stage to beg for appropriate behavior once again: apparently Jarrett had seen some people in the audience flashing their cameras.
After Cloud’s entreaty, the trio re-appeared and assumed their positions. Before playing a single note, Jarrett called out from the piano: “Zero lights!” The stage went completely dark, save for a faint light that illuminated Peacock’s music stand. Although unsettling for those in attendance, it was not the first time that Jarrett, seeking to prohibit photography on his own terms, had made such a request. In front of an audience of 4,000 people, at one of the world’s preeminent music festivals, the trio launched into “On Green Dolphin Street.” No one could see them.
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Just a few months earlier, Mason Currey published a compact little book entitled Daily Rituals (2013), which examines the schedules and routines of a variety of cultural icons. One of the more interesting figures he profiled was Haruki Murakami, the prolific and renowned Japanese writer. In describing his anti-social proclivities, Murakami explains:
People are offended when you repeatedly turn down their invitations. But, at that point, I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person but with an unspecified number of readers. My readers would welcome whatever lifestyle I chose, as long as I made sure that each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty—and my top priority—as a novelist? I don’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense my relationship with them is a conceptual one, but I’ve consistently considered it the most important thing in my life. In other words, you can’t please everybody.
It would have been impossible to predict how iconoclastic Murakami’s words would sound less than a decade later. Indeed, how many living artists—and I use that word with the widest possible invitation—share Murakami’s orientation in our contemporary moment of cultural production? In the space of jazz and creative music, I can think of very few people who have shied away from the connections social media provides in favor of a monastic lifestyle structured to minimize virtual interaction and sharing with friends and fans. Instead, we are living in a world of ecstatic sociality, where the inner lives of our artistic heroes continually unfold before us on digital platforms.
At The Blue Note: The Complete Recordings I-VI
Keith Jarrett (piano), Gary Peacock (double bass), and Jack DeJohnette (drums)
Release date: 01.10.1995 (ECM 1575-80)
Embedded within our clicking, liking, and swiping on these platforms is a profound philosophical shift in how we understand the work that artists produce. Yes, Murakami turns down invitations and eschews unnecessary interactions in a time when many accomplished artists are commenting and sharing with fervor. More revealing than these practical differences, however, is his conviction that “my readers would welcome whatever lifestyle I chose, as long as I made sure that each new work was an improvement over the last.” Such an attitude positions the work of art as a transcendent locus of meaning and beauty, separate from the artist herself, that should take precedent in the structuring of an artist’s life. However, much online activity in the music world today would suggest the exact opposite is true: the pleasures of the work of art and the pleasures of vicariously following the creator’s life are profoundly interdependent.
In such a formulation, the work is but one facet of a larger process of artistic world-building that musicians engage in. To be sure, there are myriad practical reasons for musicians’ embrace of virtual networks: they (traditionally) do their work with others; they are in front of the public often, performing in clubs, festivals, and concert halls; they can use digital platforms to quickly circumvent traditional cultural gatekeepers and reach new fans. Additionally, artists have always “shared” their work, both professional (in performances) and personal (in interviews). These processes of communication with the general public have long been central to the creation of art. What is novel, however, is the ability to document with such ease and rapidity, to not be delimited to sharing your work alone, and to curate an online profile with full control—as opposed to going through a journalistic gatekeeper—of the story you tell about your life.
This ability to so easily convene with others, and to receive such immediate feedback on your work, has created a digital ecosystem where accomplished professional musicians are more accessible and responsive than ever before. Moreover, their activities on these platforms—far from constituting a mere diversion from their creative activities—are oftentimes just as central to their artistic identities as the work they produce is. In an over-saturated, hyper-competitive market, artists look for any way to differentiate themselves, and this often means posting content that is ostensibly unrelated to their musical activities. With the omnipresent ability to document and share any aspect of your life, every action you engage in has the potential to be brand-building or relatable for your audience. This, not surprisingly, places new pressures on artists, who are advised to present far more than their artistic work alone—and to do so frequently. Quiet, solitary moments of reflection are now perpetually imbued with a latent potential to be transformed into ecstatic moments of communion with a disembodied audience.
The interpenetration of work and life, while understandable—who wouldn’t be fascinated by the life of an artist they admire?—can also be problematic in the way it promotes dubious constructions of authenticity for some cultural producers. Brooke Erin Duffy emphasizes exactly this point in her 2017 book (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, in which she explores how artists and fans relate to one another in our digital economy. As Duffy makes clear, users of social networks have to delicately balance the oftentimes competing desires to A) personally express themselves and B) market and sell their product. This is especially true for freelance laborers in creative industries, who are ostensibly selling who they are to secure professional opportunities, instead of working alongside others to craft the brand of a larger organization. However, this notion of “selling who you are” is precisely what Duffy deconstructs, considering the multiplicity of motives that are at play for preeminent cultural producers. Indeed, our digital ecosystem makes it increasingly difficult to discern just what is and is not authentic, because an action’s meaning necessarily transforms when it is shared with a wide viewership.
The affordances of digital technologies allow mundane acts of day-to-day life—reading a book, going on a walk with a child, eating food at a restaurant—to be transformed into very effective brand-building content. This effectiveness is a result, as Duffy points out, of the air of intimacy and familiarity such postings engender between fans and producers. Though this sense is largely illusory due to the fact that it is produced through a digital image that is placed in front of thousands of other admirers, it is nonetheless true that it can be a powerful influence on how fans perceive the work of an artist. When posted online, a picture of a favorite musician at a sporting event is no longer just an account of that activity. Instead, it enters a social arena where its relation to the artist’s work cannot be ignored, and where a host of motives—psychological (I want my audience to think I’m just like them), economic (perhaps my fans who are also interested in this activity will become more invested in my work), and social (I want to connect with my audience on a deeper level)—might be at play, as artists try to at once appear relatable and mobilize audiences toward actually supporting their work. The work of art speaks, yes, but not alone; it now finds company with a host of other activities that make up an artist’s life. These activities, in turn, influence how many people perceive the work of art itself—or at least their willingness to engage with it at all.
Direct online communication with fans does not necessarily bring any clarity to these complicated dynamics. Indeed, even the act of interpersonal communication has been imbued with brand-building potential on these platforms, given that commenting often takes place in a public arena where others can read your conversations. In this way, Duffy contends that digital platforms often work to “commoditize affective relations,” such as offering support or encouragement, as “[deploying] affective skills” can play a large role in increasing a cultural producer’s metrics (in addition to the value they provide to marketers and advertisers). This is not to suggest that seemingly innocuous comments of support are always effacing more business-oriented ambitions, nor is it to suggest that valuable feelings of encouragement cannot be created on these platforms. Rather, it is to call attention, once again, to the tension between authenticity and performativity that organizes online behavior. In the words of Nancy Baym, we “do not have to understand relationships in labor as inherently either genuine or alienating, empowering or oppressive. They are all these and more, often at the same time.” What is most significant is that performer-audience relations become elusive and slippery when they unfold within the parameters of digital platforms.
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Amidst all of this digital activity and interpersonal blurriness stands Jarrett, the American pianist and composer par excellence, who turns 75 on May 8th. Born in 1945 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Jarrett has crafted one of the most singularly diverse and important discographies of any musician alive today. An equally-adept purveyor of the American Songbook, European Classical Canon, Far Eastern Folk Music, and Avant-Garde Free Improvisation, Jarrett has been monastically committed to the processes of exploration and discovery throughout his career. Despite these disparate musical avenues, Jarrett remains clear that his love for improvisation—creating music on the spot, from moment-to-moment—is the sacred thread that ties these activities together.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Goldberg Variations
Keith Jarrett (harpsichord)
Release date: 01.10.1989 (ECM 1395)
For Jarrett, improvisation is more ideological than methodological: it is about committing to a state of full focus and presence, uninhibited by preconceptions and preconditions, completely alive and attentive to each unfolding moment. When understood in this way, his various musical experiences are more interconnected than they might appear. For instance, Jarrett has produced many recordings of music in the European Classical Canon, recording works with fully-notated scores to duly carry out. However, Jarrett’s interest in these works has just as much to do with the physiological state they were produced in as with their compositional structure. Noting that many composers, such as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, were improvisers themselves, Jarrett states in a 1984 interview that “I think the music is better because their relationship to improvising was so strong…there was something in the music, and I would say it is the ecstatic knowledge that comes through…it’s the knowledge of the ecstatic state, [which] is why their music conveys so much.” For Jarrett, profundity is contingent less upon the musical language itself and more about the feeling and conviction that animates it.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this “ecstatic state” is remarkably hard to achieve in modern concert settings, and Jarrett has no qualms about publicly spelling out the conditions that make it inaccessible. In a digital economy that rewards artists for engaging in small talk and thanking their audience for small likes and comments, it is nothing short of remarkable to observe an artist who chastises his fans for their poor concert-going behavior (not least because most in attendance paid a large amount of money to be there). The NY real estate agent Evan Goldfine has attempted to consolidate a few examples of these reproaches with his YouTube collection entitled “Keith Jarrett Speaks!” The 11-part series contains various audio clips of Jarrett admonishing—or, in some cases, berating—the audience about their behavior. As if to underscore the transcendent moment that was interrupted, the thumbnail for each video features Jarrett in a pose of full vulnerability, at the piano in mid-creation: mouth agape, eyes clenched shut, head tilted.
Carefully listening to these exhortations reveals both how radical Jarrett’s orientation to audiences is as well as its incongruence with contemporary manifestations of fan-performer relations. It is crucial to understand that Jarrett is not simply decrying distracting behavior because it inhibits his own creative output; he also genuinely believes that the audience will be delivered a poorer experience as a result. For Jarret, the relationship between the performer and the audience is a profoundly symbiotic one—but not in the way that digital culture envisions it. Many of Jarret’s fiercest critiques are leveled at cameras and cell phones (given at a time when that distinction had to be made), objects that have only come to be more omnipresent at performances. In the 2007 performance that resulted in his temporary ban from the Umbria Jazz Festival, Jarrett addresses the audience in no uncertain terms:
I do not speak Italian, so someone who speaks Italian can tell all these assholes with cameras to turn them fucking off right now, right now, no more photographs, including that red light right there. If we see any more lights, I reserve the right, and, I think, the privilege is yours to hear us, but I reserve the right, and Jack and Gary reserve the right, to stop playing and leave the goddamn city.
Ironically, our digital moment often codes this type of recording-and-sharing activity as done in support of the performer: audiences like what they hear, share it with their own followers, and thereby help to grow the performer’s audience. To follow this logic, however, is to fundamentally de-value the concert experience as Jarret understands it. To convene with an audience is a sacred experience, and quiet, concentrated listening is not synonymous with an oppressive, restricted environment. In fact, exactly the opposite is true: the audience is constantly participating in the music-making experience, even if they are silently attentive to the music as it unfolds. Their contribution is perhaps only understandable in metaphysical, subjective terms: the energy they give off, the bodily cues they give, the “air” in the room. Being attentive to these most minute of details requires a thoroughly inward-looking environment, extricated from the exuberant sociality of our digital moment.
To be sure, some of Jarrett’s complaints are more persuasive than others. He almost exclusively performs in large concert halls at this point in his career, spaces that do, in fact, require a certain mode of listening on behalf of the audience—more focused and distraction-free than in other types of venues. Accordingly, sometimes the only aspect inhibiting Jarrett’s access to the transcendent is the audience’s coughing, as he highlighted in a five-minute lecture at a San Francisco concert in 2010. It is this type of complaint that confuses and irritates some listeners, many of whom have given performances in spaces in which their music had to compete with far more than coughs: the stochastic ka-chings of a bar’s cash register, the rambling revelations of an inebriated fan, the peripatetic wanderings of the sound engineer. When contextualized within the wider landscape of musical performance, Jarrett’s reproaches can seem precious.
Nevertheless, it is impossible not to admire Jarrett’s deep belief in capital-A Artistry, a world in which the performer—not the venue, audience, or cultural milieu—sets the terms of engagement for a performance. It is also worth considering why other artists have not followed his lead and advocated for similar standards at their own performances. Certainly, the type of listening that Jarrett champions rarely takes place at most venues today. To enforce such a code would mean confronting the ubiquity of digital devices, and, just as crucially, enforcing policies that performers themselves may not want, being that many are fixated on sharing their work with as many people as possible. The concert-going experience is rarely only about that which is unfolding before you in the room; it’s also about your awareness of participating in that event, and your ability to share it with others as a way to both spread the performer’s work, and, just as crucially, to engage in an act of digital self-definition by marking what types of cultural activities you engage with. In many ways, audiences are now co-creators of a concert environment, imbuing it with new meanings and significations as they post and share about it online.
This sense of the audience’s agency is significant, because it is not as if social media works to simply reproduce and transmit concerts online. Rather, it entirely reorganizes the dynamics of our musical encounters. To be sure, some of this reorganization has been beneficial, and even inspiring. These platforms have precipitated novel ways of making music and connecting with others that are, in many ways, just as moving as seeing a live performance. Especially in light of Covid-19 and our current inability to congregate in person, I have found myself feeling rather grateful at times for the possibilities they offer—I have enjoyed watching the NY Philharmonic play Ravel, JALC’s memorial tribute to the late Ellis Marsalis, and my friends’ live-stream concerts. I am not disputing that these activities are genuinely valuable and uplifting for those engaged in them. What I am interested in, however—especially given the uncertainty of when we will be able to listen to each other in-person again—is how the space in which we encounter music influences both our mode of listening and the type of music that is made.
Spirits
Keith Jarrett (piano)
Release date: 29.09.1986 (ECM 1333/34)
Indeed, I believe that these platforms often upend our musical values, as we calibrate our work (and life) to fit the confined and claustrophobic parameters of digital space. Given the formal properties of these websites, some aesthetics are bound to be more fit for presentation on them than others. Consider the framework of Instagram, which has become host to a proliferation of musical content. You have to fit a video into a rectangle, spaced just a few inches wide, and, crucially, placed alongside entirely unrelated content. As has been well-documented, the aim of these platforms is not to cultivate a beneficial learning and listening environment for the user; rather, their business models center on getting you to stay on the site for as long as possible, so they can gather as much data as possible about you to sell to advertisers. It quickly becomes difficult to focus on anything, as your attention is constantly being vied for by another momentarily interesting piece of content.
When I go on social media, it often feels a lot like I’m plunging my head under water: I hold my breath and immediately become completely enveloped, bombarded on all sides by a disorienting collage of achievement, beauty, humor, stupidity, and vanity. It’s entertaining, and, I would submit, even necessary to do this sometimes, especially given that so much artistic activity is announced on these platforms. But if I stay under for too long, I drown, weighed down by the competing demands on my attention. Accordingly, music that is loud, fast, and visually overwhelming has the best opportunity of succeeding in this environment: it captures your attention quickly. The power of this type of music often comes not from the way it unfolds over time, but from the immediacy of its impact—you don’t need to experience the piece from beginning to end for it to achieve the desired effect. While this works well on digital platforms, it does not necessarily translate effectively to a live setting. Musical acrobatics are captivating for a period of time, but you cannot sustain an entire performance with them; you need development, patience, and subtlety—the precise type of qualities that do not flourish in short sound bites.
The profundity of Keith Jarrett’s recorded output can be traced to exactly those musical values that are so unfit for digital parameterization. Part of the joy of listening to Jarrett is the experience of affixing yourself to the sinuous waves of his improvisations and tracing them as they unfold over time. While he has the ability to immediately transfix a listener—rapid lines, cacophonous sheets of sound, a physical orientation to the instrument that is at once athletic and sensual—it is secondary to the way he makes meaning over the course of a performance. His phrases move in broad, gestural strokes, forsaking the hypnotic verticality so prevalent in digitally-infused music. When you listen to Jarrett improvising, you don’t bob your head up and down or aggressively pulsate with your torso; you gently sway from side to side, following the curves of the performance as they unfold. To follow these curves is to experience a type of tumbling inevitability: his lines wrap in and around one another but with a perpetual sense of forward-motion, unfurling outwards with a dual sense of elaboration and exploration. In this way, there is something deeply satisfying about experiencing Jarrett’s playing in real-time. Devoid of clichés and predictability, the satisfaction of its logic can only be experienced simultaneous with its arrival.
This is perhaps the grand irony of Jarrett’s philosophy: while he ostensibly demarcates a clear boundary between the performer and the audience, the effect of his prescription is to bring the audience closer to the performer than would otherwise be possible. Indeed, Jarrett needs his audiences, but not for their ability to expand his brand, “smash a ‘like’ button,” or index his concert within a constellation of unrelated digital activities. Instead, he needs their trust, in both the experience he will provide them and the fact that the experience is only accessible with certain behavioral preconditions. It is a trust that requires the temporary forsaking of the meta-awareness and self-consciousness that is the digital economy’s currency, and the attendant ability to lose oneself completely within the architecture of an unfolding performance. Jarrett asks of the audience exactly what he asks of himself.
Chase Elodia is a musician and writer based in Brooklyn, NY.
Banner: Keith Jarrett performing in Berlin, 1972. Getty Images.