There is a moment near the end of "Autumn Leaves" on this record where Gary Peacock's bass note hangs in the air just long enough that you forget what song you're listening to, and then Jarrett finds it again, and everything resolves, and you exhale without knowing you'd been holding your breath.
Trio — sometimes called the Standards, Vol. 1 session, because ECM issued this and its companion records under that banner — was recorded in January 1983 at Talent Studio in Oslo, and it marks the beginning of one of the most sustained and celebrated partnerships in jazz history. Jarrett, Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette had played together in various contexts before, but this was something different. This was a commitment. Three musicians agreeing, almost formally, to live inside the American songbook and see what they found there.
The Standards Project
The choice to play standards at this point in Jarrett's career was not obvious. He had built his reputation on sprawling solo improvisations — the Köln Concert had made him famous in a way jazz musicians rarely become famous — and there were people who felt the standards repertoire was a retreat, a commercial concession. They were wrong.
What Jarrett heard in "Meaning of the Blues" or "The Masquerade Is Over" was not nostalgia. He heard architecture. He heard rooms he could redecorate, or knock walls down in, or simply stand very still inside and listen to the echo.
Manfred Eicher produced, as he produced nearly everything essential on ECM in this period, and his approach was the same as always: get the right people in the right room and don't get in the way. Jan Erik Kongshaug engineered, and the sound he captured at Talent Studio is revelatory — you can hear the wood of the piano, the felt of the hammers, the breath before the note.
Three People, One Instrument
DeJohnette is the reason this trio sounds like no other piano trio. He is not keeping time in any traditional sense; he is having a conversation with the melody, with the harmony, with whatever Jarrett is about to do next. There's a moment on "God Bless the Child" where he plays something that functions simultaneously as punctuation and as invitation, and it's so perfectly placed that it sounds composed even though nothing here was composed.
Peacock had spent years in more abstract territory — he'd played with Albert Ayler, had essentially withdrawn from music for a time to study macrobiotics and Eastern philosophy in Japan. Coming back to the bass and to these songs, he brought a quality of attention that is almost meditative. His lines are never decorative. They are structural and felt at the same time.
Jarrett himself is playing with the kind of relaxed authority that only comes from genuine respect for the material. His touch is lighter here than on some of his solo work, less prone to the dramatic surges. He lets the songs be songs.
What Happens When You Listen Late
This is not an album that rewards impatient listening. It rewards the kind of listening you do when the house is quiet and you've poured something and you're not in a hurry to go to sleep. The tempos are mostly moderate or slow, the approach is almost conversational, and the emotional content accumulates gradually rather than arriving in obvious peaks.
By the time the trio reaches "All the Things You Are," you realize you've been inhabiting these performances rather than observing them. That's the thing about the Standards Trio at their best — the music becomes the room you're sitting in.
Jarrett went on to make dozens of records with Peacock and DeJohnette. Some of them are arguably better. But this first one has something the later ones can't quite replicate: the sound of three people discovering, together, that what they suspected was possible is actually, genuinely, possible.