From euphoria to exhaustion: The phenomenal pianist Keith Jarrett turns 80

Keith Jarrett is a brilliant musician and one of the most important pianists of our time. He can no longer play because his body is no longer able to cope. As early as 1996, he suffered from fatigue syndrome; for months, he could barely get out of bed due to exhaustion. But then he fought his way back to the piano, back into the spotlight, and once again thrilled audiences: in solo recitals or in a trio with his friends Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. This triumph lasted until 2018, when he suffered two strokes. Since then, the left side of his body has been partially paralyzed.

Whether the stroke in his case was due to overexertion remains questionable. However, there is no doubt about the pianist's physical exertion. Doctors had long warned him that his constant, uncontrolled contortions at the piano were a danger to his back, neck, and joints. And they certainly also suspected that his uncompromising dedication to music was straining the musician's energy levels.

Keith Jarrett knew it himself: "It's not a healthy thing to do," he says, commenting on his passionate, physical playing in "The Art of Improvisation" (2005), a highly insightful documentary about his career. But he couldn't change himself. With twinkling eyes, his mouth curled into a mischievous grin beneath his graying mustache, he says in the film: "They're just doctors, what do they know?" They know something about suffering. But what do they know about his passion?

A surprising contradiction has characterized Keith Jarrett's career since his unparalleled musical talent first emerged. On the one hand, everything comes easily to him. There's hardly a musical challenge he can't handle thanks to his musical imagination, his ear, and his virtuoso fingers. And yet, he's constantly struggling—not only with physical limitations, but also with the quality of his instruments and the acoustics of concert halls. But above all, with his own ideals and standards.

He dances from one style to another, from jazz to classical and back again. He has also asserted himself as a Bach, Mozart, and Shostakovich interpreter. But his skill culminates in improvisation, where he modulates impulses and inspirations from swing, gospel, bebop, and country to meet his high formal standards. In improvisation, the conflicting tendencies of his musicality are dialectically united: He can play anything, but tries to forget everything in order to create something new from nothing.

One could interpret this high standard as romanticism and a display of genius, and one would not be mistaken. On the one hand, Keith Jarrett staged himself with rich gestures as an original artist and a musical demiurge, distancing himself from the depths of staid human normality. Thus, he showed little sympathy for those troublemakers who couldn't suppress a cough or a nose blow in the concert hall; he frequently interrupted his performance with a tirade of abuse.

But the exaggerated concept of improvisational artistic creation germinated on the loose soil of naive longing and nostalgia. It reminded him of his happy childhood days, when, ignorant of culture and tradition, he first conjured music from the keyboard with his hands and delighted in harmonious thirds and children's melodies. Those around him immediately celebrated him as a child prodigy.

Born on May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he first discovered rhythm at the age of two. He reportedly drummed out his grooves with table cutlery. By the age of three, he was already taking piano lessons. Sometimes he tried to play the music playing on the radio, and other times he imitated sounds and noises from nature—such as the babbling of a brook. This is how he learned to improvise, he says in "The Art of Improvisation."

However, even as a child, he was bothered by his physical limitations. His hands were still too small. To counteract this, he reportedly constantly stretched and extended his fingers. This actually helped him later on to play large intervals with ease and endurance and to create that sensual fervor in ostinato figures that is characteristic of legendary Keith Jarrett albums like the "Köln Concert" (1975).

Keith Jarrett was an improviser even before he established himself in jazz. But jazz proved to be the music that best suited his musical talent. He therefore chose to study piano with the renowned pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Europe, instead of attending the Berklee Jazz Academy in Boston. He launched his career with engagements in seminal bands led by drummer Art Blakey, saxophonist Charles Lloyd, and trumpeter Miles Davis. He later distinguished himself as the bandleader of an American and a European quartet—groups in which he also played saxophone, various flutes, and percussion instruments.

Thanks to anthemic melodies and rock-funk rhythms, the jazz ensembles of Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis reached a large, young rock audience in the 1970s. And when they saw Jarrett twisting and turning in front of the keyboard with his eyes closed and an ecstatic expression, occasionally kneeling and rising again, stomping and groaning, they were hardly surprised: The physical performance fit the setting of rock culture, which underscored the orgiastic effect of the music with exaggerated physical gestures.

But even though Keith Jarrett later performed as a virtuoso solo artist in major concert halls, he was never able to free himself from the physical convulsions of musical ecstasy. One might wonder whether the pianist lost control of his body in a state of mental concentration, or whether body and mind were so closely united in his playing that every syncopation and every blue note had an immediate effect on his musculoskeletal system.

Keith Jarrett once described himself as a ventriloquist who also had to embody the puppet. Perhaps this is why his own limbs sometimes appear to him like an external device, at least as close to the piano as they are to the pianist. This is certainly the impression he creates when he refers to a hand in the third person singular: "My left hand actually had knowledge that I wasn't letting it tell me for years and years," he explains in "The Art of Improvisation"—for years he hadn't given his left hand the opportunity to impart its special knowledge to him.

The groaning that always accompanied Keith Jarrett's musical fervor could certainly be annoying. But it demonstrated how much Keith Jarrett exerted himself as a pianistic ventriloquist. That this artistic overexertion ultimately led to a physical dead end was tragic—but not entirely unexpected. The exhausting demand to constantly create something new and the pressure of audience expectations have already reduced numerous jazz musicians to a state of exhaustion and apathy.

A crisis in Miles Davis's life unfolded in a similar way to Keith Jarrett's fatigue syndrome of the 1990s. Exhausted, tired, and suffering from liver and hip problems, the then 49-year-old trumpeter retreated to his New York apartment for five years in 1975. And in 1976, the seminal bebop pianist Thelonious Monk stopped playing and speaking at the age of just 59. He spent the last six years of his life lonely, silent, and inactive in the villa of his patron, Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter.

Keith Jarrett occasionally gives interviews. Two years ago, he answered questions from American YouTube music journalist Rick Beato and revealed that he still occasionally tinkles the piano keys a bit with his right hand. Beato then played him a recording of a 1987 concert in Japan. Jarrett improvised on the jazz standard "Solar." The phenomenal solo is of such astonishing virtuosity and versatility that even Keith Jarrett smiled with satisfaction as he listened. At the end, he simply remarked, "I think I had more hands back then."