Night Beat Part 5

"We knew what we had lost," says Betts. "We even thought seriously about not going out and playing anymore. Then we thought, 'Well, what can we do better? We'll just do it with the five of us.' We had already risen to great heights by that point. But Duane didn't experience the highest point-he didn't experience being accepted across the board." Betts pauses for a long moment, and his intense eyes seem to be reading distant memories. It's as if, after all these years, he can still sense deeply all the potential joy and invention that were obliterated on that day.

A few minutes later, Gregg Allman walks in, smiling. "We got it," he tells Betts, with obvious pleasure. Betts rushes off to the control booth, where Dowd plays back the finished vocal. After a few bars of Gregg singing with an uncommon ferocity about a man who just wants to feel some hard-earned pleasures before life cheats him again, Betts' face lights up in a proud and relieved grin. Later, in a private moment, Betts corners Allman in the hallway and slugs him affectionately in the shoulder. "That was some good work," he says. Gregg blushes and the two trade a look that speaks volumes. For all the disappointment they have shared, and all the anger that has pa.s.sed between them, d.i.c.key Betts and Gregg Allman are still brothers of the closest sort.

EARLY IN THE EVENING, as another storm seems to be closing in, Butch Trucks is conducting an impromptu tour of Criteria Studios. He is looking for some of Tom Dowd's most prized trophies-the gold records he earned for engineering and producing countless legendary acts, including James Brown and Aretha Franklin-when, in one of the older studios, he stumbles across an ebony-colored grand piano. "That's the "Layla' piano," he says, referring to the instrument on which Jim Gordon played pop's most famous and rapturous coda. It is impossible to resist touching its still-s.h.i.+ning white and black keys. It is not unlike touching something sacrosanct. Clearly, this is a room where essential modern cultural history was made-where American and British rock & roll met for its finest and most enduring collaboration.

Trucks settles into a nearby chair and begins to recount the story of the Layla sessions. Clapton had come to Miami to record with the Dominos (pianist Bobby Whitlock, drummer Jim Gordon, and ba.s.sist Carl Radle). Producer Tom Dowd, who had worked with the Allmans on Idlewild South and At Fillmore East, mentioned the visit to Duane Allman, a longtime Clapton fan, who asked if he could come by some night and watch the recording. During one of the Dominos rehearsals, Dowd relayed the request to Clapton, who replied, "Man, if you ever know where Duane Allman is playing, let me know." A couple of days later, the Allmans were playing Miami, and Dowd took the Dominos to the show. Later that night, back at Criteria, Duane and Eric started jamming, and Clapton invited Allman to play twin-lead on the sessions. Together, Clapton and Allman found an empathy they had never experienced with any other players, and that they would never match. They played probing, deeply felt interweaving melodic lines like two strangers earnestly striving to discover and match each other's depths-which turned out to be an ideal musical metaphor for the sense of romantic torment that Clapton wished to convey with Layla.

On another night, Trucks says, Clapton invited the Allmans in for an all-night jam with the Dominos. "I don't remember how good we were," says Trucks, "but it was fun. It sure would be great to hear that music again.

"After we finished that jam," he continues, "Eric and Duane were playing the song 'Layla' back for us, and all of a sudden Duane said, 'Let me try something.' And he put on his guitar and came up with that five-note pattern that actually announces the song-that signature phrase that just kind of set that song on fire." Trucks pauses and shakes his head. Perhaps he realizes that he is sharing a remarkable disclosure: The most revelatory riff of Eric Clapton's career was actually one of Duane Allman's inspired throwaway lines.

Trucks is surprised to learn that archivist Bill Levenson has recently dug up the Dominos-Allmans session and plans to edit and master it for release in a Layla retrospective package. Trucks seems intrigued at the prospects, but he also admits that perhaps some experiences are better left to memory. "I remember one night that was the epitome of this band," he says. "It was during the closing of Fillmore East, but it wasn't the closing night, which was the one we recorded for Eat a Peach. Instead, it was the night before. We went on for the late show, about 1 A.M., and played a normal three-and-a-half-hour set, and when we came back for the encore, the feeling we got from the crowd . . . it was something I'll never forget. I remember sitting there with tears, just really emotional, and then we started jamming, about four in the morning, and we quit about eight o'clock. It was just one jam that went on and on, one thing leading to another, and it was magic.

"All together, we ended up playing seven or eight hours, and when we finished playing, there was no applause. The place was packed, n.o.body had left, but not even one person clapped. They didn't need to. Somebody got up and opened the doors and the sun came in, and this New York crowd, they just got up and quietly walked out while we were all sitting up there onstage. My mouth's hanging open, and I remember Duane walking in front of me, just dragging his guitar behind him, his head down, shaking it, and he says, 'G.o.dd.a.m.n, it's like leaving church.' To me, that's what music is all about. You try to reach that level. If you're lucky, you might get there once or twice. That night-maybe the greatest night of our life-wasn't recorded, and in an odd way, I'm glad."

Like Betts, Trucks says the loss of Duane Allman was insurmountable. "On just about any level you can think of, it was devastating. What kept us going was the bond that forms when you have to deal with that kind of grief. Also, we did it for his sake as much as ours. We had just gone too far, and hit so many new plateaus in what we were doing, to simply quit.

"The funny thing is, when Duane came back from King Curtis's funeral [the R & B saxophonist-one of Allman's favorite musicians-had been stabbed to death in New York in August 1971], he was thinking a lot about death, and he said many times, "If anything ever happens to me, you guys better keep it going. Put me in a pine box, throw me in the river, and jam for two or three days.' We tried taking six months off after his death, but we were all just getting too crazy from it. There wasn't any other way to deal with it but to play again. But the hardest thing was just that he wasn't there, you know? This guy was always right there in front of me-all I did was look over and there he was-and he wasn't there anymore."

But the band paid hard costs for its determination. Gregg Allman would later say he began his long bouts of drug and alcohol addiction in the months after Duane's death. In addition, ba.s.sist Berry Oakley began having serious difficulties. In some ways, the mantle of leaders.h.i.+p pa.s.sed to Oakley, but according to many observers, he was too grief-stricken over Duane's death to accommodate the demands. Then, in November 1972, Oakley was riding his motorcycle through Macon when he lost control and slammed into a city bus. The accident occurred just three blocks from where Duane had been fatally injured, a year and two weeks earlier. Like Allman, Oakley was twenty-four. And like Allman, he was buried in Macon's Rose Hill Cemetery.

"As much as Duane, Berry was responsible for what this band had become," says Trucks. "But in some ways, you could see Berry's death coming. With Duane, man, it was just a shot out of the blue. But Berry . . . he just couldn't cope with Duane being gone, and he got very self-destructive. There were nights when you wouldn't even know if he would be capable of playing. More than once, he would just fall off the stage. By the time Berry died, it was almost a relief just to see the suffering end. It was devastating, but it was expected. We could see it coming.

"That might sound cold or whatever, but by then another direction was coming."

In some ways, it was a more fruitful direction. The Allmans had recruited a second keyboardist, Chuck Leavell, and after Oakley's death, they added a new ba.s.sist, Lamar Williams, who had played around Macon with Jaimoe years before. In 1973, the band released its long-antic.i.p.ated fifth alb.u.m, Brothers and Sisters; within weeks it went to number 1, and sp.a.w.ned the group's first Top 10 single, d.i.c.key Betts' countrified "Ramblin' Man." At long last, the Allman Brothers Band had become the dominant success that Duane Allman and Phil Walden had dreamed it would become; indeed, as much as any other act, the Allmans defined the American mainstream in the decade's early years. At the same time, no central guiding vision or consensus had emerged to replace Duane's sensibility. In time, there were reports that Chuck Leavell wanted to lead the band on a more progressive, fusion-jazz-oriented course, but that Betts felt the group was drifting too far afield from its original blues and rock & roll roots. Also, a somewhat uneasy spirit of compet.i.tion was developing between Betts and Gregg Allman. Both had released solo LPs and had formed their own bands (Allman's included Jaimoe, Williams, and Leavell), and gradually, Gregg was becoming the most identifiable celebrity in the group. In part, this was due to his stellar romance with (and turbulent marriage to) superstar Cher, as well as his by-then-widely-rumored drug appet.i.tes. But Gregg's fame was also based on something more morbid: He was a survivor in a band that seemed both brilliant and d.a.m.ned, and many watched him with a certain fatalistic curiosity.

"By this time the initial spark was gone," says Trucks. Outside, the flash storm is. .h.i.tting hard. A raging rain slashes against the windows around the room. "We were getting a lot more predictable and were cas.h.i.+ng in, and we did more and more of that as the years went on-to the point where it just finally got ridiculous, where even we could see it through our drunken stupor."

Even the band's biggest moment-when the Allmans appeared at Watkins Glen, New York, with the Grateful Dead and the Band, for an audience of 600,000: the largest crowd ever a.s.sembled in America-was a hollow and somewhat bitter experience. "We just gave the people what they expected," says Betts. "Also, it was not a time for making friends. I remember that Jerry Garcia came out onstage with us and took over. There was no doubt he was going to dominate: He'd step right on top of d.i.c.key's playing. Then he made the mistake of playing 'Johnny B. Goode,' and d.i.c.key just fried his a.s.s, and we left." Trucks laughs at the memory, then looks saddened. "They never seemed to like us, the Grateful Dead, and they had been G.o.ds to us at one time. But everything was so on edge in those days, and like us, they were really in a certain eye of the storm. They were playing for huge audiences and were trying to sell lots of records and they had also lost a couple members of their band, so they were probably feeling a lot of the same doubts."

Trucks pauses and watches the rain for a moment. "The lifestyle we were going through," he says with open distaste. "It was just insane, f.u.c.king rock-star ridiculousness. Also, we had quit living together, which I think really had a lot to do with our demise. Everybody would get their own limousines and their own suites, and we'd see each other onstage, and that was it. And G.o.d, the cocaine was pouring. You would go backstage and there would be a line of thirty dealers waiting outside, and the roadies would go check it out. Whoever had the best c.o.ke, they could get in, and they would just keep it flowing all night. That right there probably has a lot to do with my negative feelings about the whole time. We were drifting further and further apart, until the last couple of years were just pure bulls.h.i.+t. Actually, to me they were just a blank. I was drunk twenty-four hours a day."

Then, almost simultaneously, the Allmans achieved their proudest success and their greatest downfall. By 1975, Phil Walden was taking a hand in Georgia politics. He had met and struck up a friends.h.i.+p with Governor Jimmy Carter a couple of years before, and Walden was among the first to know of Carter's plan to seek the presidency. In the fall of 1975, when Carter's campaign was almost bankrupt, Walden began organizing benefit concerts, featuring numerous Capricorn acts, including the Allman Brothers-Carter's favorite American band. In the end, with Walden's help and federal matching funds, Carter had raised over $800,000; without Walden and the Allmans' support, it is unlikely that Carter would have survived the expensive primary campaigns long enough to win the Democratic party's 1976 nomination.

But at the same time, the Allmans' cavalier att.i.tude toward drug use caught up with the band. In early 1976, a federal narcotics force began investigating drug activities in Macon. In a short time, Gregg Allman found himself threatened with a grand jury indictment unless he testified against his personal road manager, Scooter Herring, who had been charged with dealing drugs. Allman complied, and Herring was sentenced to seventy-five years in prison; plus, there were fears that further indictments might be leveled against other figures in the Capricorn and Allman organizations. The band members were furious. Herring, they insisted, had saved Allman from drug overdoses on more than one occasion, and now Herring had been betrayed. They felt that Gregg had dishonored the group's sense of fraternity. "There is no way we can work with Gregg again ever," said Betts at the time-and his sentiment was reportedly shared by every other member of the band. In effect, Gregg Allman had killed off the Allman Brothers Band. The various members went on to other projects. Betts formed Great Southern; Leavell, Williams, and Jaimoe played in Sea Level; and Gregg moved to Los Angeles, where he recorded with Cher, and suffered a difficult marriage in exile.

It took a couple of years, but the wounds healed. Betts now says: "Six months later I read the court transcripts and said, 'G.o.dd.a.m.n, this guy had his a.s.s between a rock and hard place.' Actually, I think we had all been set up by a Republican administration that was trying to discredit Jimmy Carter through his connection with Phil Walden and us."

In the interim, the band members found they had missed playing together-that they couldn't achieve with other bands what they had found together, and couldn't win the success separately they had enjoyed collectively. In 1978, they regrouped; Leavell and Williams opted out for Sea Level, and the band added guitarist Dan Toler and ba.s.sist Rook Goldflies; and for a brief time, Bonnie Bramlett joined on vocals. The band made one successful record, Enlightened Rogues, but then quit Capricorn, filing suit against Walden for unpaid royalties. Shortly, Capricorn went bankrupt; Phil Walden's great Southern Rock empire had collapsed, bitterly. "Walden raped us financially," says Trucks. "He felt like he had done it all and we had nothing to do with it. His worst point was his arrogance: I think Phil has a hard time believing that musicians are on a social level with him. But there's really not much point in talking about Phil Walden."

The Allmans moved to Arista and made two misconceived records, Reach for the Sky and Brothers of the Road, but at decade's end, the great pop wars of disco and punk were raging, and there was no longer an embracing receptivity for Southern Rock. "If we had found an audience that was ready to listen," says Trucks, "we would have kept going. But the yuppies wanted to get as far away from s.e.x, drugs, and rock & roll as they could get. Wanted to raise their families and pretend like it never happened. Our generation was denying its history. Well, all good things come to an end."

In 1982, the Allmans disbanded a second time. The group members occasionally toured in pairings, or collected for a jam, but they were playing music that seemed to have outlived its historical moment. And there were further bad ends: In 1979, Twiggs Lyndon-who was the Allmans' first road manager and favorite roadie; who had once stabbed to death a club manager because he tried to cheat the band; who had gone to prison and undergone tremendous remorse-was skydiving over a New York town named Duanesburg, and failed to pull his rip cord; he was dead before he hit the ground. In 1983, Lamar Williams died of cancer. The greatest American band of the 1970s was no more; it was itself merely another ghost in a memory-skein of ghosts, knitted together by the bonds of dark remembrances and lost dreams.

THERE REMAINS one subject that people in the Allman camp aren't always anxious to speak about, and that is the matter of Gregg Allman-the troubled singer who still bears the band's deepest debts and highest expectations. "It's almost unfair that we're called the Allman Brothers Band," says Trucks, "because people just zone in on that blond singer: the last Allman. It puts a lot more pressure on him than needs to be there. At the same time, he puts the pressure on himself. He's messed up plenty, and he knows it. He's doing everything he can to rectify it, but it's a heavy burden. And like anybody that has his problems, it's a day-to-day procedure, but we're all here with him.

"Anyway, one thing's for sure: You couldn't do the Allman Brothers without him. We've lost too many of us already."

Indeed, Gregg is at once the most problematic and essential member of the band. His drug, alcohol, and temperament problems have caused both him and the band famous grief, and he has suffered lapses recent enough to have made some people in and around the band wonder if this reunion can truly last. And yet, as Trucks notes, the group cannot do without him: Gregg Allman is more than the band's most visible namesake; he also has the band's voice. d.i.c.key Betts, Johnny Neel, and Warren Haynes can write the blues, and along with Trucks and Jaimoe, they can still play it better than any other rock-based band in the world. But Gregg genuinely sings the blues. It is not an easy talent, nor can it be faked. Unfortunately, it is also a talent that, to be rendered at its most effective, has too often involved the physical, moral, emotional, and spiritual ruin of those who practice it. Living the blues may sound like the h.o.a.riest cliche in the rock world, but it is also true that really living the blues can cost you everything-and Gregg Allman has lived the blues, as much as any singer alive.

The trick is, getting Gregg to talk about the blues he has lived. Actually, the trick is getting Gregg to talk about much of anything. He doesn't open up much to outsiders, and he even seems reticent with the friends and musicians who have known him for a generation or more. In particular, though, he is wary with members of the press-and for fair reason: It must not have been much fun to find his marital and drug problems plastered across the front pages of sensationalist tabloids for years on end. Also, he has pretty much gone on record repeatedly and at great length about his brother's death (it almost drove him crazy), the Scooter Herring incident (it terrified and humiliated him), and his troubles with Cher (which confused and angered him), and chances are, he may not yet truly understand just why he has had so many recurring drug and alcohol problems. Or perhaps he understands perfectly well, and wouldn't dream of explaining it.

What would be interesting to know, however, is how Allman's relations.h.i.+p to music has sustained him-and whether its siren's call has hurt him more than it ever healed him. But in Miami, he isn't of the mind to talk. He stays busy finis.h.i.+ng the vocals for Seven Turns, and he doesn't spend his voice on gratuitous conversation with anybody. And late at night-a time when, it has been suggested, Gregg may be more inclined to talk-Gregg is nowhere to be found.

One weekend a few weeks later, though, Gregg is playing a blues festival and civil rights benefit on Medgar Evers Day, in Jackson Mississippi. Seven Turns is now finished, and reportedly Gregg is as ready as he will ever be for an interview. Also, Gregg's personal manager, Dave Lorry, wants the singer to get used to playing some live shows before the Allmans' summer tour begins. Apparently, Gregg can still be nervous about performing live, and this anxiety is part of what has contributed to his difficulties with drugs and alcohol in the past. For his part, Gregg is playing the festival because two of his old blues friends, B. B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland, are on the bill; in addition, Little Milton is scheduled to appear. Little Milton is Gregg Allman's favorite singer-a model for his own pa.s.sionate style-but in a quarter-century of following blues, Allman has never seen Milton sing live, nor has he met him. He says he is looking forward to the chance, and is especially anxious to play a late night jam that will feature himself, King, Bland, and Milton.

The blues festival is being held in a big open-air metallic structure at a fairgrounds on the edge of town. Like Miami, Jackson is subject to sudden storms, and just before Gregg's van arrives at the site, a late spring torrent has turned the surrounding area to mud. Looking for a dry place for the interview, Dave Lorry talks Bobby Bland into accommodating some visitors on his homelike bus.

Seated in the bus's central room, with his wife Danielle nearby, Gregg isn't much more talkative than he was in Miami. It isn't that he's unfriendly, nor is he unintelligent; it's more like he's shy or wary or simply exhausted from twenty years of inquiries. He doesn't really have much to say about Seven Turns ("It's a good record; I'm proud of it"), or even about working with the Allmans again ("They're a fine band; I'm proud to work with them"). Even when he's talking, Gregg seems to be living someplace inside himself. He gets in and out of answers as quickly and simply as he can. Music is something he plays and sings, rather than talks about, and his life, he makes plain, is off limits. "The private facts of my life are just as private and painful as anybody's," he says in his most direct moment. "I don't enjoy going over that stuff all the time."

After a few minutes, Bland comes back to visit with Allman. It is a heartening experience to meet Bobby Bland, to watch and hear him speak. He is probably blues music's finest living singer-a vocalist as sensual and pain-filled as Frank Sinatra. In addition, he has a transfixing face: big, open, warm, impossibly beautiful and animated. It is a gracious face and he is a gracious man. If there were any justice, Bobby Bland's image would be celebrated on postage stamps, his bus would be full of Grammys, and he would have the pop audience he has always deserved.

When Bland takes a seat across from Gregg, Allman's entire manner changes. He relaxes visibly, puts his feet up on a nearby bench, sinks back into the sofa, and even allows himself a few unguarded smiles. Clearly, these two men like and respect each other. They start by talking about watching the Rolling Stones' recent live TV broadcast, but it is not Mick Jagger or Keith Richards or even guest guitarist Eric Clapton that they gossip about. What engaged their interest and humor was the appearance of quintessential boogie-bluesman John Lee Hooker onstage with the Stones and Clapton.

Allman laughs as he recalls the times he has seen Hooker on the blues circuit. "He always has these two big white women with him, both of 'em taller than he is," says Allman, smiling.

"Yeah," says Bland, "John Lee is crazy about them white women." His face opens up into a gentle leer, and he and Allman share a knowing laugh.

Bland regards Gregg warmly for a moment then says, "I just wanted to see you were okay. You know, taking care of yourself." He levels an inquiring look at Gregg.

Gregg Allman returns the look, and then blushes. "Yeah, man," he says, "B. B. King gave me the same once-over last night."

Bland smiles without embarra.s.sment. "Well, we're just checking on you," he says with paternal warmth. "Letting you know we care."

For whatever their differences in age, temperament, or cultural and racial background, these two men are colleagues. Bland regards Allman as a fellow traveler on the inescapable blues road. He knows the life Allman has lived. He knows its hopes, and he knows its ends.

Bland also knows it's time to let his family come aboard the bus, and get out of the pouring rain. This means, for the moment, the interview is over-after maybe ten minutes. Gregg can't help looking a bit relieved. "We'll talk later," he says. "Right now I'd like to stay and talk with Bobby a little while."

Actually, as it turns out, the interview is over for good. Later, Allman simply disappears again. One moment, he and Danielle are seated at the side of the stage, watching Bland's elegant blues act, and then he is nowhere to be found. He will not be there when the evening's blues-superstar jam transpires, nor will he meet or hear his idol, Little Milton. When those events take place, Gregg is someplace else-maybe in a darkened motel room, watching TV, brooding.

But midway through the afternoon, he is true to his vocation, and takes the stage in Jackson, with the rudimentary blues band that backs Wolfman Jack. This isn't the Allman Brothers, but Gregg remains that band's spirit, and as he sits behind a Hammond organ, he sings Blind Willie McTell's "Statesboro Blues," Muddy Waters' "Trouble No More," and Sonny Boy Williamson's "One Way Out" not as if they were tired songs that he has sung for a generation, but as if they were bitter facts that he was just facing in his life. This is not the man who seemed skittish back in Miami, nor is he the relaxed crony who shared ribald laughs with Bobby Bland earlier. No, it is a different man altogether who sits on this stage, before maybe five hundred people, and closing his eyes tight and tilting his head back until his blond hair grazes his shoulders, sings as if his soul depended on it. This man is a blues singer-he sings the music as if it were his birthright, and as if it offers the only moments in which he can work out the mysteries of his life and his confusion. Gregg Allman shuts his eyes very, very tight, and sings like a man who understands that every time he sings, he is singing to ghosts. Maybe he's trying to make his peace with those ghosts, or maybe he's just trying to haunt them as much as they have haunted him.

keith jarrett's keys to the cosmos.

An itchy silence rules the backstage corridor of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium-a silence just about as bearable as the hush that trails a judge's gavel at sentencing. Keith Jarrett, thirty-three, a short, curly-headed bundle of muscle, leans in a corner doorway rubbing the bridge of his nose with both hands in a prayerlike motion. Just minutes before, he finished playing the midway date of a worldwide solo piano concert tour, a performance that should easily rank as one of the more florid and sinewy displays of his career. But Jarrett seems heedless of the fact. He has answered the few attempts at congratulations by the backstage party with mutters and glares, and for the moment seems intent on a brooding reverie.

After several strained moments, Jarrett coughs a sharp, private laugh and scans his guests with an impish grin. "I never realized until now," he says, resting his stare on me, "how vain and purposeless it would be to attempt to describe what I just did on that stage. I mean, I'm not thinking about the music I just played, I'm thinking about talking to you about the music. Words are a poor subst.i.tute for experience, and in order for me to talk about any of this at all, I'm going to have to play games with you." He pauses to pet the bristly contour of his mustache. "I think it's totally appropriate that we say nothing now."

With that, the itchy silence returns.

ALTHOUGH HE WOULD probably bridle at the suggestion, Keith Jarrett is to jazz what Jerry Brown is to California politics-a guileful and feisty enigma. Jarrett doesn't exactly brim with what might be termed straight talk, because, simply, he doesn't believe his designs to be comprehensible under the myopic lens of Western scrutiny.

Jarrett, who first won acclaim for his work in Charles Lloyd's and Miles Davis' early fusion ensembles, creates music that by all surface criteria is jazz: an improvised form of music rooted in swing rhythms and blues-derived scales. Yet his music also has a strong harmonic similarity to the work of such twentieth-century European composers as Debussy, Bartok, Schonberg, and Stockhausen, which writers and fans alike laud as a union of jazz technique and modern cla.s.sical theory.

According to Jarrett, though, it's nothing of the sort. He a.s.serts that his music is beyond categorization-devoid of will, purpose, influences, or even conscious methods, music that very nearly transcends human processes, and therefore, human considerations.

Jarrett has often said that when he takes his seat at the piano for a solo concert, he has no idea what his fingers will play, that his entire performance is in fact a "spontaneous composition." That places what he does outside the usual provinces of improvisation, which generally means extemporizing melodic lines on given themes, harmonic progressions, or modal settings. Jarrett theoretically constructs his theme and overall structure on the spot, which is hardly as unprecedented or superhuman as some of his supporters claim, but Jarrett pursues it more extensively than anyone else ever has. It is a risky undertaking, and Jarrett's concerts meander just as often as they enthrall.

In emphatic contrast to so many of his colleagues who rose to prominence in the last decade-particularly those who, like Jarrett, pa.s.sed through Miles Davis' bands-Jarrett has proudly shunned fusion and funk in favor of strictly acoustic settings, including his solo campaign. Of the twenty-five alb.u.ms or collections he has released in the last five years (comprising forty-three discs), five of those (or eighteen discs' worth) have been solo piano volumes, a staggering output for any artist, and all the more impressive when one considers how first-rate it's been.

The showstopper is Jarrett's latest release, the Sun Bear Concerts, a ten-record account of his 1976 solo tour of j.a.pan a.s.sembled in a booklike slipcase with a suggested retail tag of seventy-five dollars. No one has ever before released a ten-record set of all new music, and it isn't likely that anyone ever will again-unless it's Jarrett. His previous solo volumes have sold well enough to border on gold-unusually good for jazz-but Warner Bros. (the distributors for Jarrett's German-based ECM label) worried about how to promote the bulky Sun Bear. Jarrett undertook a solo tour scheduled expressly to promote his monolith. Spanning New York to Tokyo, it has been his most extensive undertaking to date.

Releasing a ten-record set doesn't strike Jarrett as a particularly indulgent act, just as his oft-stated claim that no other composers or jazz artists have influenced his style doesn't strike him as a conceited or ill-founded boast. In fact, he avidly disavows the merit of most contemporary music other than his own (though he does profess a liking for Linda Ronstadt's pipes and an occasional Bob Dylan song), and all electronic music, he insists, is poisonous.

Underscoring Jarrett's grandiloquence is his temperament. On occasion he can be just plain arrogant. He's famous for halting concerts to scold late arrivals or berate photographers. Other times, he's stopped performing until the piano can be retuned to his standards. In short, Jarrett's music may spring, as he claims, from egoless sources, but his disposition, it would seem, is nothing less than the epitome of an artistic ego-proud and moody.

JARRETT AND I meet for the first time in New York, the day after his tour opened in mid-October 1978, with a concert at the Metropolitan Opera House (the only other soloist who has ever been invited to play the Met was Vladimir Horowitz). Although I've been in the city for four days, Jarrett has had no time for an interview, and when we finally meet, it is in the back seat of a limousine en route to LaGuardia Airport, where he is to leave for Chicago. As we speak, he strokes the handle of a tennis racket and peers through smoky sungla.s.ses at New York's disappearing skyline.

"My time is fairly important," he says in a brittle, clipped cadence, "so I don't have much of it to spare. Just what did you want to ask?" There's nothing haughty about his manner, particularly, and nothing intimate. Indeed, it's about as bald and matter-of-fact as I've ever encountered.

I start by asking him how consciously or a.n.a.lytically he monitors the music as he's improvising it, how much his own ear dictates what an audience hears.

"The process is mysterious," he says evenly, removing his sungla.s.ses and fixing his dark eyes on mine. "That's the best thing I can say about it."

"Surely there are decisions you make in that moment-to-moment process about what notes to play and not to play, and how long and how loud to play them?" I ask.

He shrugs a smile and half nods his head. "Since it's all improvised, every second may contain a hundred choices for me, and my first job is to know whether I'm making those choices mentally or not. Like, if my finger is about to play a note, I can't play it because I want to play it, and yet I can't not play it because I don't want to. It's a course of thought and no thought, decision and no decision."

WHEN JARRETT talks about the course of "decision and no decision," one gets the impression of a man knee-deep in an Oriental discipline, and, in fact, some critics have viewed his music as the proselytizing excesses of a yoga, Sufi, or Zen student. Jarrett does adhere to some kind of stoical code, but what it is, he won't say. The closest I can place it is Taoism, the Chinese religious and political movement based upon the ancient Tao-te Ching. The idea of Tao translates, roughly, as the "way" or "path," a driving power and rhythmic force in nature that is life's ordering principle. It informs and motivates man's spirit, and when one surrenders to its pulse, one grows in tune with the benign dictates of the universe, becoming a vehicle for its will.

Wherever Jarrett's notions of self-propelled music spring from, they've certainly come home to roost on the Sun Bear Concerts. Nowhere else in his collected works does music seem more effortless and splendid. From the opening phrase onward, it unfolds like an idyllic dream on the border of consciousness, and like the best of dreams-or narratives-you never want it to end. It is, to my mind, one of the few real self-contained epics in seventies music.

Jarrett's improvisations rarely rank as bona fide compositions because they're usually formless adventures, devoid of identifiable themes, movements, and resolutions. But this is also their strength. Instead of clearly delineated melodic trains, Jarrett focuses on a mood-most effectively in a minor key or mode-then traces it through interminable transitions that just skim the rim of a retainable melody. That he can do it as effectively with atonal structures as he can with blues or impressionist forms merely indicates the expanse of his imagination.

Probably the most striking feature of Jarrett's solo music is the degree of intimacy he has with his instrument, which adds an interesting hitch to his claim that music flows of its own will through his blank consciousness. More likely it is a process far less mystifying: Every time Jarrett places his fingers on the keys, he isn't just opening himself to the whims of a muse, he's summoning his variegated background as a pianist.

Jarrett, of French-Hungarian extraction, grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A prodigy, by age fifteen he had consumed a cla.s.sical repertoire ranging from Bach to Bartok and was attracted to jazz by the Ravel-influenced reveries of pianist Bill Evans. In the early sixties, Jarrett studied improvisation at Boston's Berklee College of Music, where he eventually was discharged for insubordination. He played support to almost any Boston and New York club act that would have him (including, most notably, Art Blakey), a practice he now lauds as the prime influence in his eclectic point of view.

By 1966, Jarrett had settled into Charles Lloyd's Quartet, who, with their cultivated hippie air and breakthrough shows at the Fillmore, were one of the earliest harbingers of fusion jazz. With them, Jarrett first began to attract an audience for his idiosyncratic flights, including a fondness for pummeling the piano's interior. His subsequent tenure with Miles Davis was weird and fitful, though he now says that the experience was as positive as he could hope for with electronic music: "It was music that was conceived for electronics. There was no other way of playing what Miles was coming up with."

In 1972, everything fell together for Jarrett. His own group-which included ba.s.sist Charlie Haden, saxophonist Dewey Redman (alumni of Ornette Coleman groups), and drummer Paul Motian-released two stunning alb.u.ms: Birth (Atlantic) and Expectations (Columbia), showcasing one of the most protean and irrestrainable quartets of the seventies, featuring a fully ripe Jarrett hammering out complex blues and polytonal fugues with rock-derived fervor. Also that same year, he released his first solo alb.u.m, Facing You, for a then-obscure, budding German label called ECM (Editions of Contemporary Music), prompting critic Robert Palmer to exult in these pages that, "When he plays alone, Jarrett pushes his creativity to its limits. . . . It is without a doubt the most creative and satisfying solo alb.u.m of the past few years."

After that first solo effort, Keith's heart belonged to ECM-and solo recording. Although his quartet (which had moved to ABC/Impulse) continued to record prolifically-including in a one-year span, three of their finest alb.u.ms, Fort Yawuh, Death and the Flower, and Treasure Island-they increasingly became a perfunctory, misshapen unit bound together by contractual commitments.

At ECM, the label's producer/mentor, Manfred Eicher, allowed Jarrett to record in any style he fancied, from the flawed In the Light (compositions for chamber ensembles) to the sublime three-record Bremen-Lausanne. With Bremen-Lausanne and the subsequent Koln Concert, Jarrett found his niche, freely mixing gospel, impressionist, and atonal flights into a consonant whole.

While Eicher's production style is so meticulous and refined that it leaves most ECM artists sounding cold and prosaic, in Jarrett's case Eicher furnishes the canvas best suited to the artist's brush. Together, they make some of the most sterling ascetic music of the day. If Keith Jarrett has at last arrived, it hasn't been alone.

WHEN JARRETT and I meet again, it's on the far side of the continent, in the backstage corridor at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. After the show and Jarrett's terse dictum about the futility of words, a small cl.u.s.ter of nervous admirers files into Jarrett's dressing room for autographs. Jarrett for the most part is cool but polite with the visitors, who seem to be seeking some meaningful banter or disclosure about the mystery behind his music. Jarrett appears to both relish and reject his role as sage, depending upon the questioner.

"How does it happen," asks a scraggly Scandinavian in stumbling English, "that you have so much energy in your hands?"

"How does it not happen that no one else does?" replies Keith with his imp's smile. A few moments later he abruptly turns aside another blus.h.i.+ng devotee's jittery inquiry, saying, "I can't take people who are as serious and philosophical as you." In near tears, the kid turns and leaves.

The next morning, Keith and I hook up again in a limousine en route to the Los Angeles Airport, where Keith and manager Brian Carr are to catch a flight to Hawaii. Jarrett's cheeks and chin are marked by lines of exhaustion, pinching his face into a tight pucker. Grudgingly he acknowledges the transaction of an interview. That morning in the bustling airport bar we have a brief conversation: "Several of the people backstage last night seemed to be trying to tell you that they find something beyond music in your concerts-some action or discipline that may be tied to a spiritual or philosophical level," I venture.

"I don't know what the words philosophical and spiritual mean. I know that what goes on while I'm playing could be translated into philosophy by anyone who wants to eliminate a lot of their being in the process, by converting it into a system of thought or discipline. I don't have the privilege of doing that. If I did, it would limit the music."

"Do you think your music conveys emotions to the audience?"

"Conveying an emotion would be music at its most gross use. Conveying the clarity of energy is music at its highest. Emotions are already so colored. . . . For example, the music might convey an emotion if I heard somebody click a camera. I'd then have a momentary feeling; I would have to explode. Now that wouldn't necessarily create music, but it would be an enema of sorts, you know, to rid myself of the moment that had just defiled what was happening.

"I'd like to say something here without you asking a question. I came to realize recently that I can't let go of the essence of what's happening to me, moment to moment, just for the sake of etiquette. That means I'm as committed to spontaneity now as I would be playing the piano onstage. Spontaneity tells me what should be happening at this exact second. So if your questions don't fit into that, it's an impossible subject to deal with. In a way, the concerts preserve my life outside of the music, and vice versa. And if I let either of them down, I'm sinning.

"The music is the reason I'm known at all. It created the interest in doing an interview with me. But because it was music that did, it means that I should adhere to the laws of music. I understand the process that you need to deal with, but I can no more help you with it than if no one was sitting in this chair. To me, you want to talk about subjects in which I have absolutely no concern."

"You have no concern if people choose to categorize your music as jazz?"

"Well, you're helping that. What I mean is, a lot of people won't read this because it's an article on jazz, and you're helping to reinforce that architecture. Now you're trying to reduce things that are of no concern into interesting questions and answers. I hope my music can't be understood within the context of your article. Why do you think it's so easy to forget what I play? Because what I do isn't about music. It's about an experience beyond sound."

"You also once said that your purpose is 'blowing people's conceptions of what music means.' "

"That was me in the role of an ego. I'm growing now, and making less of those doctrinaire statements."

"Does that mean that your feelings about electronic music might change in time, too?"

"No, because those aren't feelings, they're physiological facts. Just being in the same room with it is harmful, like smoking cigarettes. . . . But what you're doing is what the Western world would love to have continue forever, which is picking apart a world that doesn't deserve to be picked apart. If there's going to be a profile of me in your magazine, it's a profile you're drawing from yourself, and you're getting answers from me because I'm not being myself enough to jump in the air, turn a cartwheel, and leave this room-which is what I feel like doing."

With that, Jarrett excuses himself to make a call to his wife in New Jersey before catching his flight. Our interview, I gather, is over.

"Look," says Brian Carr, who's been sitting by attentively the whole time, "you should come over to Hawaii for a couple of days. There, he'll have a chance to relax and talk with more ease. After all, you two should have more contact than this."

THREE DAYS LATER, standing in an open-air hotel lobby in rainy Lahaina, Maui, I tell myself that more contact with Keith Jarrett is the last thing I should have. I have been in the hotel for about an hour, trying to reach Brian Carr with no luck, so I decide instead to ring Jarrett's room and say h.e.l.lo. It's a mistake. Maybe I have interrupted some kind of cosmic process, but whatever, Jarrett is fit to be tied.

"I don't have a machine to protect me," he snaps. "I only have one person to act as a buffer between me and everyone else, and I don't feel like I should have to be disturbed by someone calling me instead of Brian. You're proving more and more that there's nothing to talk about-and that there's no meaning to the things that we talk about."

Does this mean, I ask myself, that I am unknowledgeable? Unenlightened? Then fine. I've followed this prima donna from New York to Hawaii and have only been able to get an hour's worth of conversation with him. I feel like packing my hopelessly limited Western point of view into my overnight bag, turning a cartwheel, and leaving this island, because that seems to be what the moment dictates. In fact, I'm about ready to do just that when I get a call in the hotel lobby from Carr, asking me to meet him in a bar in downtown Lahaina.

Carr has been something of a counselor to me in my dealings with Jarrett, and the combination of his suasion and two mai tais cools down my indignation considerably. I agree to stay and wait for the spirit of spontaneity to move Jarrett to a more colloquial frame of mind. Finally, as luck would have it, in the middle of Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, I get a call that Keith will see me now.

Jarrett, clad in a black Avedis Zildjian Cymbals T-s.h.i.+rt and jeans, greets me at the door of his penthouse with the same distracted air that he uses to greet his audiences. Without a word, he strolls over to the balcony, slides the gla.s.s part.i.tion open, then settles into an apricot-and-lime-tinted sofa. The moist air, was.h.i.+ng in off the ocean waves a few yards away, seems to ease some of the tension in the room. Perched forward on the edge of his seat, Jarrett studies his thick, muscular fingers as they clinch one another in a vise grip.

"This interview has been hard for me," he says in a subdued tone, "because I don't feel like I'm able to shake the foundation of what words are supposed to do, which is the only way it could be my interview. I'm shaking foundations with music, so it only makes sense that I should be able to do that in other areas, too. The thing is, how can I express that there's no more to say-that all interviews are bulls.h.i.+t-and still allow you to do your job?"

He sinks back into the folds of the sofa, hooking his arms over its back like a bird in roost and occasionally fluttering a hand to underscore a point. "The solo thing I'm doing is growing more sensitive, and also more subject to destruction, so it has to be protected. There are things now that I can't be asked to do that maybe five years ago I would, not because I'm getting more eccentric or arrogant, but because the process requires more consciousness, more tuning. Everything gets fussier and purer. . . . You know, it's funny, but death hovers around quite a bit at a solo concert."

"Death?"

"Yes, the possibility that I might not live through a concert because of how vulnerable I am to anything that happens. It's like my ego isn't strong enough to protect me at those moments. Sometimes I feel as if I'm putting my finger on an electric line and leaving it there."

I recall something Brian Carr had said when we first met: "It's quite an ordeal Keith goes through to do these solo concerts. There's always the possibility in some people's minds that this just might be the night he can't play, the night he remains blank. I think that possibility seems just as real to him as anyone else."

Maybe, but I have a hunch that Keith's ego is a whole lot tougher-and more cunning-than he may admit. It probably shapes and informs his music to a greater, more artful degree than any trancelike communion with higher forces ever could. The detractive part of that ego is its haughty manner with the real world and its capacity for indulgence. But that's probably okay. Certainly there's no correlation between an artist's talent or vision and his temperament, because a lot of real b.a.s.t.a.r.ds have made some d.a.m.n transcendent art.

I don't have to live with Jarrett's bullying, insolent manner, but I'm more than happy to live with his music. As distasteful and pretentious as he can be, he has created a vital and durable body of recordings that is going to serve as consummate doc.u.ments of solo improvisation for generations.

After a few minutes the conversation turns to the Sun Bear Concerts. Keith is interested in my reactions to the set and whether I think it can find an audience. "If there's anything I wish would sell for the right reason," he says, "it's that set. I was involved in a very searching period of time when we recorded that, and the music itself was almost a release for the search. I've been thinking-Sun Bear is the only thing I've recorded that runs the gamut of human emotion. I think that if you got to know it well enough, you'd find it all in there someplace."