Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett (born May 8, 1945) is an American pianist and composer.

Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey and later moved on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis.

Jarrett was born on May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to a mother of Slovenian descent.

Jarrett's grandmother was born in Segovci, near Apače in Slovenia.

Jarrett's father was of mostly German descent.

He grew up in suburban Allentown with significant early exposure to music.

Jarrett possesses absolute pitch and displayed prodigious musical talents as a young child.

He began piano lessons before his third birthday.

At age five, he appeared on a television talent program hosted by swing bandleader Paul Whiteman.

He performed in his first formal piano recital at the age of seven, playing works by composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Saint-Saëns, and ending with two of his own compositions.

Encouraged by his mother, he took classical piano lessons with a series of teachers, including Eleanor Sokoloff of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

Jarrett attended Emmaus High School in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, where he learned jazz and became proficient in it.

He developed a strong interest in contemporary jazz, and was inspired by a Dave Brubeck performance he attended in New Hope.

He was invited to study classical composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, but he was already leaning toward jazz and turned it down.

After his graduation from Emmaus High School in 1963, Jarrett moved to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music and play cocktail piano in local Boston clubs.

In 1964, Jarrett moved to New York City, where he played at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village.

Art Blakey hired Jarrett to play with The Jazz Messengers.

Jarrett's appearance on the Messengers' live album Buttercorn Lady marked his commercial recording debut.

However, there was friction between Blakey and Jarrett, and Jarrett left after four months of touring.

During a show he was noticed by Jack DeJohnette, who recommended Jarrett to his band leader Charles Lloyd.

The Charles Lloyd Quartet had formed not long before and were exploring open, improvised forms while building supple grooves, and they were moving into terrain that was also being explored, although from another stylistic background, by some of the psychedelic rock bands of the West Coast.

Their 1966 album Forest Flower was one of the most successful jazz recordings of the mid-1960s.

They were invited to play The Fillmore in San Francisco, and won over the local hippie audience.

The quartet toured across the U.S. and Europe, including appearances in Leningrad and Moscow.

Their concert at London's Royal Albert Hall was attended by The Beatles.

The band was profiled in Time and Harper's Magazine, which made Jarrett a popular musician in rock and jazz.

The tour also laid the foundation for a lasting musical bond with DeJohnette.

Jarrett began to record his own tracks as a leader of small groups at first in a trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian.

Life Between the Exit Signs (1967), his first album as a band leader, was released by Vortex followed by Restoration Ruin (1968), which Thom Jurek of AllMusic wrote was "a curiosity in his catalog".

Not only does Jarrett barely touch the piano, but he plays all the other instruments on what is essentially a folk-rock album.

Unusually, he also sings.

Somewhere Before, another trio album with Haden and Motian, was released in 1968 on Atlantic Records.

Since the early 1970s, he has also been a group leader and solo performer in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music.

His improvisations draw from the traditions of jazz and other genres, including Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music.

His album, The Köln Concert, released in 1975, is the best-selling piano recording in history.

In 2003, Jarrett received the Polar Music Prize and was the first recipient to be recognized with prizes for both contemporary and classical music.

In 2004, he received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize.

In 2008, he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in the magazine's 73rd Annual Readers' Poll.

In February 2018, Jarrett suffered a stroke and has been unable to perform since.

A second stroke in May 2018 left him partially paralyzed and unable to play with his left hand.