Category Archives: Books

New biography in German to be published on November 28, 2014

A new biography of Keith Jarrett in German, written by Wolfgang Sandner and simply entitled “Keith Jarrett: Eine Biographie”, will be published on November 28, 2014. An ebook version will also be available.

Wolfgang Sandner has also published a biography of Miles Davis in 2010, which wasn’t translated into any other language, so it’s very likely that the new biography will only be available in German.

Thanks to Arnulf and Matthias for the information.

Update (December 1, 2014). The publishing date is now March 6, 2015.

New book on “The Köln Concert”

A new book on “The Köln Concert”, by Peter Elsdon, will be published at the end of December in the US and at the end of January in the UK. You can order the book from:

Book description (from Oxford University Press):

Keith Jarrett ranks among the most accomplished and influential pianists in jazz history. His Köln Concert stands among the most important jazz recordings of the past four decades, not only because of the music on the record, but also because of the remarkable reception it has received from musicians and lay-listeners alike. Since the album’s 1975 release, it has sold over three million copies: a remarkable achievement for any jazz record, but an unprecedented feat for a two-disc set of solo piano performances featuring no well-known songs.

In Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert, author Peter Elsdon seeks to uncover what it is about this recording, about Keith Jarrett’s performance, that elicits such success. Recognizing The Köln Concert as a multi-faceted text, Elsdon engages with it musically, culturally, aesthetically, and historically in order to understand the concert and album as a means through which Jarrett articulated his own cultural and musical outlook, and establish himself as a serious artist. Through these explorations of the concert as text, of the recording and of the live performance, Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert fills a major hole in jazz scholarship, and is essential reading for jazz scholars and musicians alike, as well as Keith Jarrett’s many fans.

“Keith Jarrett’s Transformation of Standard Tunes” (book)

I’m a little late on this (this has already been discussed on the Keith Jarrett Yahoo! Music Group, as well as on KeithJarrett.it). Anyway, the musicians among you might be interested in “Keith Jarrett’s Transformation of Standard Tunes: Theory, Analysis and Pedagogy”, a book written by Dariusz Terefenko and published on March 11, 2009 by VDM Verlag. It’s apparently very technical, so it’s probably not for everybody.

Ian Carr (21 April 1933 – 25 February 2009)

As many news outlets have already reported, British jazz musician and writer Ian Carr died on February 25, 2009. He was the author of Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music and also collaborated on the 2004 documentary Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation, produced and directed by Mike Dibb. More information can be found on iancarrsnucleus.net.