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Jazz & Bach: Keith Jarrett's Style

Keith Jarrett's performance of "I Love You Porgy" features simple embellishments that make the harmony more flowing, similar to Bill Evans. In the ending, Jarrett uses a three-part countermelody with the middle voice emphasized through volume. When playing "I Fall In Love Too Easily", Jarrett's piano solo features independent, contrapuntal lines influenced by Bach's chorale style, as seen in his use of call-and-response and four-part voicing. Jarrett's improvisational style draws from polyphonic composers like Bach through his imitation of their inventions, chorales, and fugues.

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Hanjie Zhang
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461 views8 pages

Jazz & Bach: Keith Jarrett's Style

Keith Jarrett's performance of "I Love You Porgy" features simple embellishments that make the harmony more flowing, similar to Bill Evans. In the ending, Jarrett uses a three-part countermelody with the middle voice emphasized through volume. When playing "I Fall In Love Too Easily", Jarrett's piano solo features independent, contrapuntal lines influenced by Bach's chorale style, as seen in his use of call-and-response and four-part voicing. Jarrett's improvisational style draws from polyphonic composers like Bach through his imitation of their inventions, chorales, and fugues.

Uploaded by

Hanjie Zhang
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
  • I Love You Porgy Analysis
  • I Fall In Love Too Easily Analysis
  • Comparative Techniques
  • Conclusion

Keith Jarrett

“I Love You Porgy”


From “The Melody at Night, With You” Album 1999

(example 1)

In “I love you porgy” Keith Jarrett used some very simple embellishment like inner passing tone
and neighbor tone, double approach tone etc (example 1)to make the harmony sounds more
flowing. Similar to Bill Evans, he’s dynamic is also very rich.
(example2)

How ever what was special In “I love you porgy” is Keith Jarrett used a “3-part” counter melody
on the end of this piece (start from 4:25 of the original recording). Different from previous
musicians like Bill Evans and Bud Powell, he use the middle voice to emphasis the melody (the
red line connected the middle voice in example 2), we can clearly hear it because he stress the
middle line by volume to make it obvious. But the middle line does not only stay in the middle
but also go to the top at certain point (4th bar of example 2).
“I Fall In Love Too Easily”
Live in Tokyo at Open Theatre East 1993
The most fascinating part of this recording is definitely the piano solo outro by Keith Jarrett, the
whole outro is full filled with his contrapuntal style and polyphony improvisation.

The red circle indicates the part which are independent from the top melody.

The techniques Keith Jarrett used here has very strong influence of Bach’s chorale music.
below are some example of Bach’s chorale, invention and fugue, compare to Keith’s music.
Example 1
“Bach : chorale 10. Ach was sol lich Sunser machen”

Example 2
“Keith Jarrett: I Fall In Love Too Easily”

The whole part of the last solo by Keith Jarrett is similar to Bach’s chorale due to it’s multiple
individual line going at the same time.

We can even identify this by just looking at the shape of example 1&2, the SATB four-part
voicing on Bach’s chorale are quite similar to what Keith Jarrett have done on “I fall in love too
easily”.
Example 3
“Keith Jarrett: I Fall In Love Too Easily”

Example 4
“Bach: Invention 1 in C Major, BWV 772”

On the red circle(example 3), Keith Jarrett plays kind of like Bach’s Invention(example 4), by using
the “call and response” movement between top melody and bottom left hand movement.
Conclusion

1 Inherited the style of previous musicians

Keith Jarrett use inner voice in the way of some previous musicians like Bill Evans.

2 imitate style of poly phony music

Keith Jarrett’s contrapuntal way of improvisation has strong influences from


polyphony music like Bach’s invention, chorale and fugue.

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