REVIEW
September 2006
Keith Jarrett
Tokyo Solo
★★★★½
ECM 672309 (DVD)
Tokyo Solo contains some of the provisional answers Jarrett was sorting through in late 2002. It is the same concert ECM cherry-picked to fill out the solo album Radiance; however, when the two 45-minute sets and the three encores are seen and heard in their entirety, the music takes on a new emblematic dimension. Jarrett painstakingly unknots tangled arpeggios, kneads the dissonance out of the phrases and jabs his way through material that defies resolution, until the endorphins finally overtake him, and joy courses through the music.
Director Kaname Kawachi has an almost clairvoyant sense of what is about to happen, and he deploys his seven-camera crew with amazing precision. The framing is consistently immaculate. The pans, tilts, and zooms never fail to enhance the music, and the pacing is pitch perfect. As a result, Tokyo Solo is one of the most entrancing concert films to be released in many years.