‘Slowly: Song for Keith Jarrett’ by Noah Haidu Review: On Legacy and Loss

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A jazz pianist honors the musical luminary with an album-length exploration of his signature sound, with a few twists of his own.

Pianist Noah Haidu had just entered his teens in the mid-1980s when he heard Kenny Kirkland playing piano on recordings by the pop singer and bassist Sting. Entranced by Kirkland’s style, he was drawn into the jazz sensibility of which it spoke. Kirkland, who died in 1998 at age 43, was never anything close to a household name. Nevertheless, he made a distinctive mark in jazz, especially in bands led by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Mr. Haidu’s “Doctone,” released last year, was dedicated to Kirkland’s music. Now, for his latest album, Mr. Haidu has turned his focus to another pianist, Keith Jarrett—as near a household name as we get in jazz and instrumental music.

Pianist Noah Haidu

Photo: Jimmy Katz

In his liner note to “Slowly: Song for Keith Jarrett” (Sunnyside), Mr. Haidu confesses that he just couldn’t relate when his father first played him “The Köln Concert,“ the 1975 release that established Mr. Jarrett’s reputation for solo-piano recitals as grand statements of extended improvisation and which stands among the best-selling solo-piano recordings of all time. By then, Mr. Haidu was deeply invested in jazz—but more along the lines of, say, Wynton Kelly, an elegant yet subtly subversive pianist best known for his indelible contributions to Miles Davis’s music, and who formed his own marvelous trio. In fact, on the new release, Mr. Haidu’s gently swinging version of “What a Difference a Day Makes” sounds more like Kelly’s 1966 recording of the tune than anything Mr. Jarrett played. 

Through the years, it became a family ritual for Mr. Haidu to accompany his father to Mr. Jarrett’s solo recitals, and to engagements of Mr. Jarrett’s longstanding group with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette (often called his “Standards Trio,” for its devotion to familiar songs). Gradually, Mr. Haidu found himself affected by Mr. Jarrett’s “distillation of life experience channeled through the piano,” he writes in his note, and by “the extraordinary truth and emotion in his melodies.” 

“Slowly” was inspired by that influence as well as by a sense of loss. Mr. Haidu’s father died a week before a February 2017 Jarrett concert at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Haidu kept the ticket his father had given him and attended what was, it turns out, likely Mr. Jarrett’s last public performance, owing to a debilitating pair of strokes the pianist suffered in 2018. The eight tracks here form less a tribute than a reflection on the ways in which Mr. Jarrett’s approach—to the piano, to a standard, to the communication within a trio—get absorbed and distilled by Mr. Haidu’s own trio with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Billy Hart, and on how pain gives way to joy.

No pianist can match Mr. Jarrett’s delicate touch or idiosyncratic brilliance, and Mr. Haidu isn’t fool enough to try. Besides, by now he has developed his own compelling brand of pianism. Yet the dance of dissonance and consonance and the repeated quizzical figure of the title track here, the album’s only solo-piano piece, hint at the searching aspect of Mr. Jarrett’s solo work. On Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia,” Mr. Haidu enters via the bridge, as did Mr. Jarrett on “Standards I/II—Tokyo,” a DVD chronicling two 1990s concerts by his trio, but Mr. Haidu’s version is slower and more ruminative. 

Photo: Sunnyside Records

“Air Dancing,” the atmospheric waltz composed by Mr. Williams that begins this album, arrives largely through shimmering washes of sound that radiate whenever Mr. Hart strikes his ride cymbal and via the warm tones of Mr. Williams’s acoustic bass, which often bleed from note to note with the grace and translucence of a watercolor painting. Such sonic signatures from these elder masters—Mr. Hart turned 80 shortly after this recording session; Mr. Williams is 79 years old—guide this music’s flow as much as any directives from Mr. Haidu, who is 48, or any inspiration from Mr. Jarrett. 

The clever harmonic movement of “Duchess,” one of two compositions from Mr. Hart, sounds like the sort of thing Mr. Jarrett enjoyed digging into. Throughout, if Mr. Jarrett’s presence hovers, it is mostly through suggestions of balance that his trio, and this one, exemplify: of sadness and jubilation, of intensity and relaxation. All of which comes across most forcefully through the album’s centerpiece, a long track that segues from “Rainbow,” a Jarrett piece sometimes attributed to his wife, Margot, into Mr. Haidu’s own “Keith Jarrett.” The latter hangs on to the former’s suggestion of longing yet ends up sounding buoyant and free, like a pent-up spirit released.