keith jarrett stella by starlight transcription

#Keith jarrett stella by starlight transcription free#

If you ask a group of very different artists to draw the same vase of flowers, you will quickly discover their various aesthetic preferences, their technical differences and similarities, even the contrasting ways in which they see a bunch of peonies in water. In one sense, however, standards really are like drawing. And since no one in this discussion is actually right or wrong, the contention will always continue and much time will be wasted. And anyway, knowing your standards is to jazz musicians what drawing is to visual artists. It is only the templates – harmonic, melodic, stylistic, instrumental – that situate the music within that particular genre.

#Keith jarrett stella by starlight transcription free#

Others would argue that if the music is merely spontaneous and free there is no special reason to label it jazz. Jazz is an improvised music and, some say, it should pour out of its performers, spontaneous, free and unhampered by a dependency on the harmonic template of a song composed eighty years ago by George Gershwin.

Most concepts in jazz are more or less contentious – jazz musicians and, particularly, jazz fans are an opinionated lot – but the standard is something of a special case, because it goes to the heart of the matter. The concept of the standard has long been a matter of contention in jazz circles. On Yesterdays, it is actually Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (from 1933) that yields the presumably unwitting fragment of “Wonderwall.” It’s either a classic bebop tune by the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk or Powell himself or it’s from the Broadway/Tin Pan Alley pantheon of composers such as Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern. His idea of a standard is little different from Bud Powell’s or Bill Evans’s.

Younger players such as Brad Mehldau might tap pop music from Paul Simon to Radiohead, or even “Wonderwall” itself, in search of potential new standards, but Jarrett remains a traditionalist.

TOWARDS THE END of a track on his newly released trio recording, Yesterdays, pianist Keith Jarrett plays a melodic phrase that sounds as though it has escaped from the Oasis song “Wonderwall.” It brings the listener up short, because of course Jarrett is not that kind of jazz musician.