Keith Jarrett - Arbour Zena (1976 Japanese ECM / Trio Records Stereo LP)

Vinyl: VG+
Sleeve: VG+
Obi: None

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Keith Jarrett - Arbour Zena | Vinyl LP - 1976 Japanese ECM / Trio Records Original Pressing (ECM-1-1070 / PAP-9045)

By October 1975 Keith Jarrett had just released The Köln Concert and was at the height of his solo improvising powers, but the work he brought to Tonstudio Bauer was something else entirely: through-composed, scored for strings, dedicated to specific people and ideas. Arbour Zena is one of his earliest sustained attempts to fold the orchestral language he had been developing on the previous year's Luminessence into the small-group improvising he was doing with his two regular quartets. The result sits closer to ECM's emerging chamber-music sensibility than to anything in the American jazz mainstream of the moment, and Jarrett himself has consistently rated it among his most lyrical and inspired works. Garbarek's tenor and soprano lines move through and around the string parts rather than over them. Haden's bass holds the centre. The Stuttgart strings, conducted by Mladen Gutesha (the Yugoslav-born conductor who had also led the Luminessence sessions), do the work that an orchestral string section is rarely asked to do in a jazz context - they listen, leave space, and respond.

The Japanese ECM licence sat with Trio Records from the early 1970s through 1979, after which the catalogue moved to JVC. Trio's pressing standards across the Jarrett, Garbarek, Burton and Towner ECM titles are uniformly strong, and this Arbour Zena was issued contemporaneously with the German Eicher original in 1976 rather than as a later reissue. The Japanese audience took to ECM earlier and more comprehensively than almost any other market outside Europe, which is why the Trio-era pressings circulate in cleaner condition than many of their European counterparts forty-five years later. This is the 1976 Japanese ECM / Trio Records original pressing.