I have spent a lot of time with these solos. I don’t find much time for gigs these days, but I always try and put aside some time to regularly work on my playing. These transcriptions (along with many other Keith Jarrett solos) have been invaluable in developing my technique and my approach to improvisation over jazz standards. Below are some thoughts on getting the most out of these solos.
If you are a piano player, start with right hand only and learn to play them by memory. Take a phrase at a time and once its comfortably in your recall, go on to the next one. This can be a little slow at first, but the key is not to be in a rush. It takes as long as it takes to memorise something and playing it by reading the music is not the same.
Now I don’t say this as a die hard dogmatist jazz afficionado (reading music is an important and helpful skil), but it comes from lots of experience memorising and not memorising stuff and getting a sense of what works best. Also, just learn one solo at a time. It may take a while learning all of these but eventually, they will become ingrained, and be like a set of etudes to do during practice, and you don’t want reading music to be involved at that stage.
I use a software program called Transcribe to both transcribe some of these solos, and use it as a practice tool. Make sure you know how the phrase should sound on the recording, memorise it with this in mind. Once you have learnt to play the solo from memory, you should also get to the point where you can play it along with the recording.
I have spent a long time working on these solos by playing them along with the recording at around 25-35% speed. This probably seems overly slow, but it gives your ears a chance to really soak up the rhythmic subtleties of the recording, and not only of Keith Jarrett’s playing but of the other musicians too. I find that so much of my approach to time is influenced by Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette as well as Keith Jarrett, and this has come from playing these solos along with the recording and locking into the time as much as possible and using slow speeds to do it. I find playing them slow to mid speed also really helps with technique. I will rarely take them up to 100% speed, but if you are going to do it, just concentrate on one at a time. You will no doubt find certain phrases that are really technically challenging at 100% speed, so do not rush the process of building this technique. It will come eventually.
After spending a lot of time playing the solos along with the recording at 25%, I find I generally play them now at about 60-70% speed as a general daily practice thing. A neat thing about the Transcribe program is that is makes it very easy to change speed but keep the pitch the same.
I will play these through in my head when I am on a train, a plane, in a meeting, wherever. You should know them well enough so you can imagine each note of the solo. This really helps your ears develop, and solidifies the sound of different chord progression of the jazz standards. A great jazz guitarist once told me that some of your best practice can take place on the bus, just going through tunes in your head, trying to imagine chord changes.
All of these solos have just had the right hand transcribed, pretty standard for jazz transcriptions. However, given the solos are pretty technically demanding, they present a great opportunity to get a lot of balance between left and right hands. Almost all piano players have a left hand that is much weaker than the right, and the left hand just kind of leans on the right and backs it up. But what you really want is for your left hand to have the same facility and ability to improvise as the right hand. It is interesting that even piano players with enormous technique seem to have this issue.
So you can use these solos to develop a lot of independence in both hands, and move to the point where either hand can take the lead at any time. I actually started out as a guitarist and learnt a bunch of these solos on guitar which presents different issues, so just do what works for the challenges of your particular instrument.
There are of course many ways to practice these besides just playing them through. You might learn them in a different key (again, take it slow and memorise). I have also done things like play each note as the bottom note in a chord, so play each note with a major third above it, or major triad, or fourth chord or something. This really builds you ability to play chords. Once you think about it, there are endless variations like this you could do. You can also do things like play the notes of the underlying chord in one hand while playing the solos with the other, or improvise in one hand while playing the solo, kind of two part invention style. It does not really matter what you do, as long as you keep finding ways to develop your playing. Generally with practice I always want it to be a deeply musical experience, not an exhausting experience, so keep that in mind when you work with them. Over the years I have approached these solos in all kinds of ways (even singing the solo while playing the chords which is great for your ears) but for my practice schedule these days, l will play all the solos in right hand, then in the left hand, then together, and complement this by always being sure to learn a couple of new jazz standards each week.
It is interesting to think about which notes Keith Jarrett uses and when he uses them but when you try and systemise this you tend to find endless patterns and possibilities.
It is certainly not possible to try and reduce what is going on here into scale choice or something. Analysing these solos reveals that Keith Jarrett uses all twelve notes of the octave over all chord choices at different times. What seems to be going on here is instead a deeply sophisticated and intuitive understanding of how voice leading can be embedded into one's aural cognition, along with an exposure to the audio lineage of jazz music.
These solos are really a testament to the ability of the human mind to process and work with audio information, and reproduce it in novel ways. I am not sure how this helps with your daily practice, but remember that the process of learning how to improvise is cognitively complicated rather than analytically complicated. While there are lots of fascinating analytical and mathematical questions that this information gives rise to, for the purpose of learning how to improvise, its is important not just to see these solos as containing a set of rules that collectively give a solution to the problem of improvisation.
In any case, I hope you get a lot of value out of these solos. I have found that, over the years, my study of them has completely transformed my understanding of music, and not only as a jazz improvisor. When I became interested in music, I wanted to learn everything about it. I wanted to know how to orchestrate, how to write counterpoint, how to write a Fugue, how harmony worked. I have found these solos to invaluable in developing my sense of melody, voice leading, what is possible in harmony. Most importantly, developing expertise about music seems to be accompanied by developing that elusive sense of how music seems to work, and being comfortable with the fact that any theory will become subordinate to your developed judgement as a musician.
Jamie Gabriel 2016