In February 1987, Keith Jarrett recorded, on a Steinway grand piano, the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach. It was the first in a series of acclaimed Bach recordings he would make for ECM. On March 7, 1987, prior to the release of the studio set, Jarrett performed the complete WTC Book I for an audience at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in New York state, a venue renowned for its beautiful acoustics; an archival live recording of this concert, is being presented for the first time. When the studio album was released, Jarrett's manner in these iconic preludes and fugues surprised many listeners with its poetic restraint. The pianist was deeply attuned to what he called "the process of thought" in Bach; by not imposing his personality unduly on the music, Jarrett allowed every note of the score to come through via the natural lyricism of the contrapuntal melodic lines, the dance-like pulse of the rhythmic flow. These qualities are strikingly apparent in the live recording. Few jazz artists have so richly explored classical repertoire from Bach and Mozart to Shostakovich, Bartok, Barber and more as Jarrett. {ECM Records}

This is a cool-headed and yet thoughtful and percipient reading of the Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach, performed "live" by Keith Jarrett, a pianist whose reputation and renown have been built around his legendary jazz improvisations, but has been known to both impress and rattle the classical music establishment with everyone of his ventures into the classical idiom. One of his live solo recordings, the famous Koln Concert from 1975, holds the distinction of being one of the best-selling piano recordings of all time.

Every good pianist knows that in order to master any piece of music, you need to commit each hand to memory well enough so that they both become autonomous when brought together. But then so many musicians fall into the trap of focusing all of their expressive attention on the right hand which lends the left hand a "robotic" feel. With many composers, and especially Bach, what the left hand plays is just as crucial to the musical narrative as what the right hand does. As a matter of fact most of Bach's ingenious counterpoint, which is the point of study within the Well-Tempered, is delegated to the left hand. Glenn Gould was one of the first great Bach specialists to bring this out clearly. And in this concert recording, Keith Jarrett never loses track of the main subject as it weaves from finger to finger or hand to hand. His tempos are generally relaxed and well-justified. (Some of the new up-and-coming generation of pianists recording this have set down some of the pieces at ludicrous speeds and it simply doesn't work). As mentioned above, Jarrett's interpretation is free of hyperbole and exaggerations, but yet is not cold and detached like Angela Hewitt's account for example. You can tell that there's a thinking and feeling human being sitting at the keyboard, hard at work marvelling at and uncovering the unwavering logic of music composed 300 years ago. Well worth adding to your collection.