Turning 70 Today

Not only is it one of my major yearly observances, #PynchonInPublic Day, for which I'm re-reading Gravity's Rainbow on the MetroNorth train to and from work in honor of Thomas Pynchon's 78th birthday, but it's the 70th anniversary of VE Day -- May 8, 1945 -- the day on which Keith Jarrett was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I'll listen toThe Köln Concert to celebrate later tonight, but here he is with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette playing "Autumn Leaves."



Happy Birthday Keith!

Charlie Haden 1937-2014

The great bass player Charlie Haden just passed away today. His new album with Keith Jarrett just came out a couple of weeks ago, but here's a video of the two of them from their earlier home-studio collaboration four years ago.

And here they are from much earlier in their long collaboration, in a trio with the late Paul Motian on drums in 1972.

Paul Motian 1931-2011

Paul Motian died yesterday at the age of 80. Here he is playing in Germany in 1972 as the drummer in a very talented trio:

He has a solo at the 7'50" mark of this video, but the real beauty of this tribute is his great conversational skill in interacting with Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden. He had millions of great musical conversations, many of which were recorded. I'm going to put At the Deer Head Inn on the stereo now (with Keith, Paul, and Gary Peacock in 1992).
Doesn't politics seem intensely trivial in the face of a great trio?

Can you find a better way to spend 65 dollars? ... a two-day course of enlightenment for less than the price of an SUV's tank of gasoline

I hate to brag, but here's the visual proof that my Sunday and Monday made up for the fact that I couldn't make it to Washington DC on Saturday.
What can you say about a football stadium, "The Birthplace of College Football" at Rutgers, being sold out and silent as the Dalai Lama talked informally and with great humor and seriousness about war, peace, compassion, attachment, and reconciliation to 36,000 new friends? It was a Sunday morning I'll never forget.
And Monday night? I expect that in a year or two ECM will release a record by Keith Jarrett called "Keith Jarrett Solo at Carnegie Hall" or, more likely, "The New York Concert" (to fit neatly with the solo improvisational concerts that made Köln, Vienna, and Paris famous) and you'll wish you were there in the sold-out hall too for his only US solo concert in the past decade, from the first note through the five encores. I've been to a lot of concerts since I first saw the Allman Brothers and Johnny Winter at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 1971, and this one ... one man alone at an unamplified piano in Carnegie Hall for two and a half hours ... beat them all. Or maybe it was just that seeing the Dalai Lama the day before had opened my mind to fully accept this music on this night.
(Sorry if this post seems insufficiently engagé, but Bush and Cheney and Brownie and the rest of our gang in DC just seem so small and insignificant after brushes with spiritual and artistic greatness over the past two days. Some atrocity will get TBL back on the case of these petty greedy thin-skinned "men" soon, but right now I'm listening to Radiance, so excuse me if I don't give a shit.)