(ANSA) - NEW YORK, OCTOBER 21 - Keith Jarrett still plays in dreams, but in life he confronts a future without a plan.
"I don't know what the future will bring me. What I can say now is that I am not a pianist", the legendary artist of the "Cologne Concert" confessed to the "New York Times" who in 2018 suffered two strokes, one after the other. with the result that his Carnegie Hall appearance in 2017 was probably the last in a long career.
Jarrett is one of the most celebrated jazz-new age pianists in the world.
That evening in New York, a few weeks after Donald Trump took office in the White House, he opened the concert with an indignant monologue on the state of politics.
The pianist was supposed to appear again at Carnegie in March, but the concert had been canceled due to unspecified farewell reasons at the time.
Only now has Jarrett broken the silence, as his record label, ECM, is about to release the 2016 Budapest Concert recording. A stroke at the end of February 2018, followed by another in May.
"I was paralyzed. My left side is still partially paralyzed. I can walk with the cane, but it took over a year."
It took long months of rehabilitation in a clinic.
After returning home last May, in the middle of the pandemic and in the days of his 75th birthday, Jarrett went back to the piano playing counterpoints with his right hand: "I was pretending to be Bach with one hand".
More recently, while trying to play familiar bebop tunes, Jarrett found he had forgotten them.
Now that he can no longer do it as before, the musician plays in dreams, "but it's not like real life".
(HANDLE).