2001 was a vintage year for the Jarrett trio, as three outstanding live albums - “The Out-of-Towners”, “Always Let Me Go” and “My Foolish Heart”- have already shown. “Yesterdays”, registered at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Festival Hall, is a fourth 2001 concert recording, with an all-standards programme and a strong emphasis on bebop, including Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple from the Apple”, “Shaw’nuff” by Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and Horace Silver’s “Strollin’”. There is also an exhilarating splash of ragtime in the shape of “You Took Advantage Of Me”, and beautiful ballads including the title track and “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” (both from Jerome Kern’s pen). As a bonus: the album concludes with a radiant “Stella by Starlight” captured at a soundcheck: Jarrett, Peacock and DeJohnette playing just for the joy of it...
Tracklist:
1 Strollin' 8:12
2 You Took Advantage Of Me 10:12
3 Yesterdays 8:55
4 Shaw'nuff 6:10
5 You've Changed 7:55
6 Scrapple From The Apple 9:01
7 A Sleepin' Bee 8:17
Intro / Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
8.1 Intro 1:37
8.2 Smoke Gets In Your Eyes 6:55
9 Stella By Starlight 8:04
Double Bass [Double-Bass] – Gary Peacock
Drums – Jack DeJohnette
Piano – Keith Jarrett
BACKGROUND
Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” speaks of ‘Days I knew as happy sweet/ Sequestered days/ Olden days/Golden days...’”. 2001, clearly, was a golden year for the Jarrett/Peacock/ DeJohnette trio, rich in exceptional performances; “Yesterdays” is the fourth album culled from their 2001 touring. In the chronology it belongs alongside “Always Let Me Go”, also recorded in Tokyo in April of that year, and it balances that album’s exploratory earnestness with a light and often playful touch that also brings forth music of great creativity – this time focussed and marshalled inside the ‘standards’ tradition. As Jarrett said to the Los Angeles Times recently, “We know how musical these songs are... Jazz musicians don’t have to always break down doors: there’s music inside the rooms too.”
This particular set’s emphasis on bebop embraces Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple from the Apple”, “Shaw’nuff” by Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver’s “Strollin’”, and a piece often associated with Dexter Gordon, “You’ve Changed”. The show tune “You Took Advantage Of Me”, which in a more rigorously ‘ragtime’ version would be a highlight of the Montreux performance issued as “My Foolish Heart”, is also heard here, and there are beautiful ballad interpretations including two Jerome Kern songs, “Yesterdays” and “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, as well as Harold Arlen’s mid-tempo “A Sleepin’ Bee”(which Gary Peacock memorably played with Bill Evans in 1964).
Tracks one through eight were recorded at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Hall. The album concludes with a rare ECM bonus track - an ‘audio verité’ account of a piece taped at a soundcheck a week earlier, at Orchard Hall. In this context, too, with no audience present, the trio players give their hearts, energies and full attention to the music.
The release of “Yesterdays” follows the 25th anniversary of the trio in 2008, a celebration marked by intensified touring activity, much press attention, and a number of historical releases from ECM – two double DVDs (“Standards I/II” and “Live In Japan”) as well as the widely-acclaimed three CD box “Setting Standards”, which documented the birth of the Standards project in the now-legendary New York recordings of 1983. Additionally, three of Jarrett’s titles – “Standards Live”, “Bye Bye Blackbird” and the solo “Facing You” - were reissued in ECM’s popular ‘Touchstones’ series. This banner year for Jarrett was capped by his induction into Down Beat’s Hall of Fame in December.
The work with the trio goes on, of course. As Keith Jarrett says, "If you meet the perfect other two players for your needs in a musical jazz situation, why would you force yourself to go around the corner and find other people to play with?"
“Yesterdays” is issued simultaneously on CD and vinyl (180 gram pressing): it’s the first new ECM vinyl release from ECM in 15 years.
