Pianist Keith Jarrett, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian assembled at Hamburg’s NDR Funkhaus on a summer’s night in 1972 to perform a bold, highly explorative set, which is now the matter of a new album.
The trio had formed six years earlier in 1966 and were in essence Jarrett’s first major band. Charlie Haden – who sadly passed on last July - had come from Ornette Coleman’s band, while Motian had been a member of Bill Evans’s trio.
On the night, the ECM label recorded the concert which went out on German radio. Last July, label boss Manfred Eicher remixied the music on original tapes in Oslo.
The opener Rainbow pulses with inner integrity. It’s a warmly sensuous performance, but beware of a false sense of security. For most of the rest is, ahem, challenging.
Everything That Lives Laments begins quietly, building mood with percussive effects - 1972 was indeed a good year for bells and hypnoptic chimes. There follows some fretful wood flute from Jarrett - who also plays soprano sax on the album - pitched against Haden’s few, desultory notes.
Was all this free-form stuff part of the trendy fad for orientalism, perhaps aspiring towards some kind of Tibetan starkness? Just asking.
Piece for Ornette continues the fragmentary, chopped-up approach, while on Take Me Back, Haden uses a bow to play his instrument and Jarrett gets characteristically epic on piano. Fortunately, the album concludes with the vibrant,14-minute Haden composition, Song for Che.
The booklet contains some photos taken during that German tour. Jarrett with his Afro hair looks like Carlos Santana, tambourine close to hand, seated at the piano in flares and Cuban heels.
Preoccupied and zoned in on its own locus, Hamburg ‘72 is a bittersweet cocktail, and sometimes a kind of desperate howl.In conclusion, however, one cannot deny the brave attempt to try to make something new, however torn and conflicted it may be.
Paddy Kehoe
