For anyone interested in the state and fate of jazz, Keith Jarrett's The Melody At Night, With You (ECM) is by far the most important jazz release of recent months. In a way it's a very modest offering: An hour of old love songs and standards played solo on the piano, with little sign of the surging improvisational gusto that marked Jarrett's epochal Koln Concert of 1975. Since then, Jarrett has maintained a life of unflagging and categorydefying musical exploration.
The release last year of the Tokyo '96 concert with long-time collaborators Jack De Johnette (drums) and Gary Peacock (bass) added another haul of standards to the trio's ongoing trawl of the jazz catalogue, but it also suggested that the pattern of Jarrett's creative regime had become predictable. That, it turns out, was an optimistic forecast.
In the autumn of 1996 Jarrett became ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. If that is a more accurate name for what is popularly known as ME, for Jarrett, it is a "stupid" understatement. "It should," he said, "be called Forever Dead Syndrome". He couldn't do anything, he couldn't play the piano. For someone who claimed that "playing the piano" had been his "entire life", it was like not existing.
Recorded at his home studio in rural New Jersey, The Melody At Night is the album of Jarrett's convalescence, his first tentative steps towards re-existence. Lacking the energy to embellish the tunes with his characteristic virtuosity he has sought, instead, to strip them down, to approach their essence. What was once a springboard has become a crutch. When he took a break from improvising music to begin recording Bach in 1987, Jarrett remarked, "this music doesn't need my help".
This time around it was the pianist who needed the help of loyal old tunes such as Someone To Watch Over Me and I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good. Finding themselves needed and profoundly appreciated, the songs have been re-invigorated and brought back to life. Jarrett is not the first jazz musician to find solace in their loveliness, and what Nietzsche called "the gratitude of a convalescent" pours forth continually, tenderly and beautifully.
If this seems a sentimental reading, that doesn't make it important - consider Jarrett in the wider context of jazz at the tail-end of the century through which it has streaked. Is there not something entirely appropriate - inevitable, almost - that one of the greatest living jazz musicians should have succumbed to exhaustion when the medium in which he was working had utterly exhausted itself?
From the early 1940s to the late 1960s, jazz strode confidently into the future, constantly revolutionising itself. Such was the speed of development during this period that, in its aftermath, musicians could build careers stock-taking the immense hoard of cultural riches laid in by the likes of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis (with whom Jarrett played in the early 1970s). As a consequence, the forward momentum of the music diminished to the point where it became choked by the enormous weight of the past. Like the Mississippi, the jazz delta began to silt up. The only direction was sideways - east more often than not - to the edges of the form, into world music.
Jarrett's extraordinary productivity has been due in no small measure to his refusal to restrict himself to jazz (he considers his own most significant release to be the utterly unwestern Spirits, another home-recorded album). At the same time, however, his trio has spent much of the last15 years engaged in an extensive curatorial reappraisal of the jazz backlist. His biographer, Ian Carr, considers these recordings of standards to be among the best Jarrett has made. I disagree. The format of most of these albums has been similar: 50 minutes of standards and 10 minutes of amazing Jarrett originals.
To adapt a phrase of Fitzgerald's - Scott, not Ella - Jarrett rowed on but was borne back ceaselessly into the past. The Melody at Night is, in this light - this twilight, rather - a kind of destiny, for Jarrett and for jazz.
This can be heard in another way, too. A crucial part of the jazz tradition has been the way that debility - think of Django Reinhardt's fire-scarred fingers - can enhance. One could go further and suggest that, in jazz, a diminution of power can produce a dramatic heightening of effect. It is no surprise, then, that this album is haunted by the ghost - the touch - of the damaged god of the keyboard, Bud Powell. The history of jazz has been the history of people picking themselves up of the floor.
This is the rough truth articulated so delicately by Jarrett's new album - and that's why there is nothing depressing about it. On the contrary - to revert, again to Nietzsche's hymn to convalescence - what we hear after Jarrett's "long privation and powerlessness," is "the rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a re-awakened faith in tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again, of goals that are permitted again, believed again". We await Jarrett's account of these seas, these adventures, with more anticipation than ever.