Jarrett: Blahing the blues away at Hill

By John Uhl

Daily Music Editor

Saturday night, the troll of Hill Auditorium lurked beneath the stage.

The haughty imminence of Hill quells nearly a block of North U. Pastel blue and glimmer gold, its halo arc hovers over azure organ pipes with the puritanical precedence that elevates Hill above lesser Ann Arbor venues: The maize and blue crown jewel of the University's auditoriums.

Yet under the perfect echo of its veering dome, the impish squeaks of an animated gargoyle, unaware of the concert above by Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, were audible. At least that's the way I'd like to think of it.

What I was really hearing was the awful whine of Jarrett singing along with his piano. The jazz pianist is notorious for humming along with his improvising, a fairly common fetish among jazzers. But Jarrett squirms over his piano bench like a bored child, shrieking like a pig in a slaughterhouse.

The irony of this distraction is that Jarrett is very fickle about the acoustics accompanying his playing situations. Ann Arbor was one of only five stops for the pianist this fall. And as Jarrett has cataloged over fifty albums for ECM (a label that is renowned for sapping the life out of recordings by many fantastic jazz musicians), the choice of Hill's cavernous dry hall as a performance space is rather apt.

More than anything, it's indicative of the misguided sentiment that jazz should be regarded as "America's classical music." The green idea of Wynton Marsalis and a few other uncreative cats from the '80s, neo-classicism and the modern trend of featuring blockbuster jazz names (like Jarrett, Peacock and DeJohnette) on expensive tickets seems bent on removing everything that's dirty about jazz from the music.

Jazz used to be written about in dirty books. White jazz musicians were forsaken by their families for playing the music, which was spawn in whorehouses. The word jazz itself originally held sexual connotations. A pianist used to be able to groan to his music without seeming odd. Now it costs $35 to get into the Blue Note and Lincoln Center is building a whole complex for the promotion of its jazz program.

Now, a bunch of tight-assed Ann Arborites sit in Hill Auditorium in utter, painstaking silence. (After commenting on the performance, I was actually shushed by one woman, a gesture that is such the antithesis of jazz's social origins that it nearly made me sick enough to puke on her.) And what they heard was one of the most soulless, boring performances I've ever witnessed.

Jarrett, Peacock and DeJohnette have been interpreting standards, the body of American popular songs from the '30s-'50s, since 1983. Unfortunately, an extended vamp ending to "Autumn Leaves," a one-key piece that is a lot like a long vamp anyway, was last night's only product from 20 years of tinkering with form. Most of the tunes featured extensive piano introductions and piano solos with brief additions by Peacock's bass or DeJohnette's drums. Occasionally they traded fours.

That Peacock and DeJohnette didn't play more was particularly disappointing, since their pithy contributions were generally more inspired than the solipsistic meandings of Jarrett, whose endless phrases rarely build to any definable climax or denouement.

I left in disgust when the trio kicked off their encore of "When I Fall In Love," a song that never hearing again will help me die as a happy man (save for the Miles Davis Quintet rendition).

Basically: The sound of my own urination would have been more musically stimulating than what was played. Keith Jarrett took two and a half hours away from my life that I'd like back.

Courtesy of UMS

Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett and Gary Peacock lulled Hill to sleep.