Composed live 1976; 8 minutes

After the contrapuntal clarity of Bach’s Sinfonias and the earlier stylistic arc stretching from Rameau to Philip Lasser’s chorale variations, Keith Jarrett’s Encore from Tokyo offers a different kind of intimacy—inward, improvised, and quietly ruminative. “I’ve always thought Jarrett’s improvisations are influenced by his interest in Baroque music,” Simone Dinnerstein says. “The whole work is almost a set of variations.”

Keith Jarrett stands as one of the most singular pianists of the last half-century. Emerging in the 1960s as a jazz improviser with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd, and Miles Davis, he went on to redefine the solo piano jazz recital. His fully improvised concerts—most famously The Köln Concert (1975)—unfold as spontaneous architectures, drawing on gospel, blues, Baroque counterpoint, folk modality, and classical lyricism without ever settling into a single idiom.

Encore from Tokyo comes from his November 1976 solo performances over two weeks in Japan, captured in a 10-LP, 6-CD set known as the Sun Bear Concerts. In these seven concerts, encores often distilled the evening’s expansive improvisations into something more songful and direct, nowhere more so than in Tokyo, a half century ago, November 14, 1976. After the large-scale, organically evolving forms of his two-part set, Jarrett’s encore turned inward – melodic lines suspended over left-hand ostinatos, gently pulsing harmonies, time loosened, rhetoric softened. Heard after Bach’s disciplined contrapuntal “Inventions”, it feels like a quiet afterimage: counterpoint dissolved into meditation, structure yielding to breath.

— Rameau, Bach and Jarrett program notes copyright © 2026 Keith Horner. Comments welcomed: khornernotes@gmail.com