Keith Jarrett, two strokes "I'm no longer a pianist"

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 following the other, with the result that her appearance at Carnegie Hall 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 due to appear again at Carnegie in March, but the concert had been canceled for health reasons then unspecified.

Just today Jarrett broke the silence, while his record label, ECM, is about to release the recording of the 2016 "Budapest Concert". A stroke in late 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, 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".

For Jarrett, who came back to live and play twenty years ago after overcoming chronic fatigue syndrome, it is painful and "physically frustrating" to listen to piano music for two hands: "Schubert is too much. Because I know I couldn't do it. I won't be able to heal. The best I can do with my right hand is hold a cup. So - he jokes sadly - it's not "don't shoot the pianist". been shot ".

The New York Times notes the paradox of a Keith Jarrett who no longer considers himself a pianist.

Family legend has it that the Allentown, Pennsylvania musician began improvising on the keyboard when he was just three years old.

A journey that became public in the 1960s, first with Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, then with Charles Lloyd's group in which Jack DeJohnette also played, then with Milers Davis.

In 1975 his solo "Cologne Concerto" became the best-selling jazz album in history: a triumph against adversity, between fatigue, physical pain and the frustration of having to play on a piano inferior to the favorite Steinway.

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