Keith Jarrett
The Celestial Hawk
ECM Records (Germany) 1980
ECM 1175 (LP) Original pressing.
sleeve : EX(slightly wear on side and corner)
media : EX/EX(some slightly noise. side B has some very slightly hairlines that does not affect to sounds)
Released in 1980, this album is by American pianist Keith Jarrett, who rose to international prominence while still in his twenties through historic masterpieces such as Solo Concerts and The Köln Concert. Recorded at Carnegie Hall in New York in March 1980, the work features Jarrett himself on piano with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christopher Keene. Written for orchestra, percussion, and piano, it is a large-scale composition and remains one of the most unusual yet significant works in Jarrett’s catalogue.
The background to the piece dates back to 1976, when Jarrett received a commission from Deutsche Grammophon to compose a work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa. Rather than writing a concerto centered on jazz improvisation, however, Jarrett produced an almost entirely through-composed work lasting approximately forty minutes and extending to nearly two hundred pages of score. This reportedly created a fundamental difference in expectations between the composer and those who had commissioned the work, and the original premiere was ultimately abandoned. Jarrett and Manfred Eicher eventually took it upon themselves to record the piece for ECM. Neither a conventional orchestral composition nor jazz dominated by improvisation, this is a masterpiece possessing a unique and deeply personal spiritual world. Although released four years before the launch of ECM New Series, it may also be regarded as one of the works that laid the foundations for Eicher’s later establishment of the series. Original German pressing.
A1: First Movement
B2: Third Movement