The Longest Yard Sale – County Highway

Essay

Keith Jarrett Drags Our Asses to Church

The art of playing the wrong instrument

Somewhere out there in the night is an animal with electric eyes waiting to devour you

Jazz piano isn’t for everyone

By Tyler Barstow

As the story goes, Miles Davis once stopped a mid-twenties Keith Jarrett in a jazz club to tell him he was playing the wrong instrument. Jarrett responded by saying he was relieved someone else understood that. The two men went on to play together in stints, with both Davis’s touring band and his early ’70s sextet. Jarrett played piano when the two met, and he still plays piano now. Davis paired him on the keys with Chick Corea, giving his live tour at the time the kind of bebop backcourt that puts jerseys in rafters. So, as is often the case when it comes to genius, the comment about the instrument wasn’t a comment about the instrument. It was dharma. A legendary moment of game recognizing game. Jarrett’s career wouldn’t calm down for five decades, and neither would the Lao Tzu-esque anecdotes. One of his personal mantras became, “Don't follow in the footsteps of the wise, seek what they have sought,” an enharmonic rendition of Matsuo Bashō’s famous line. In a 2014 interview with …

Review

Magic Wand

The heavy art of acid-comedown music

When the lie of youth can no longer be plausibly maintained, enlightenment beckons

Don’t ask me what it all means, man — it’s been years since my last trip

By Armin Rosen

As great musicians approach and then surpass their 30s, they reach an event horizon where the lie of youth can no longer be plausibly maintained. It often happens rapidly, and even drugs start to do more harm than good. Then what? A couple possibilities remain for artists on the brink of creative middle-age, as the seminal year of 1991 still warns us: You can capitulate to whatever got you where you are, or you can start the hard, maybe impossible work of leaving it all behind. In 1991, Metallica released a self-titled monster of a record that trapped them in a creative morass of mega-stardom that sucked away whatever was left of their younger, infinitely cooler selves. In contrast, the merciless onslaught of time, which panics and flummoxes even the Kirk Hammetts of the world, liberated the ’80s new wavers in Talk Talk, the English trio that scored a moderate hit with “It’s My Life.” Having already mastered pop, the band released Laughing Stock, a 43-minute semi-improvised jazz-folk …