The Old Country: More from the Deer Head Inn (ECM)
Keith Jarrett / Gary Peacock / Paul Motian
Released November 8, 2024
The Guardian 10 Best Jazz Albums of 2024
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About:
Keith Jarrett’s recordings from the Deer Head Inn have a special place among his recordings devoted to explorations of jazz standards and the American songbook. And The Old Country is a document of particular historical significance, from several perspectives.
The Deer Head Inn, situated in Pennsylvania’s Delaware Water Gap Region, has presented live music continuously since 1950, making it one of the US’s oldest jazz clubs. In 1961, the club gave Jarrett, then 16 years old, his first gig as leader of a piano trio. When owners Bob and Fay Lehr retired, handing the reins over to their daughter Dona and son-in-law Christopher Solliday, Jarrett offered to play there again, to honour the club’s ongoing commitment to jazz.
On September 16, 1992, Jarrett, joined by Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, played to a packed house. There had been no promotion, but news of the event had spread by word of mouth. The Deer Head is an intimate venue and the Allentown Morning Call paper subsequently reported that, “of the 130 people inside the club, 30 had to stand. On the porch outside, another 50 or 60 people stood.”
The spontaneously organized performance marked the only occasion on which Jarrett, Peacock and Motian played as a trio. Peacock, at the time, was a dedicated member of the Standards trio completed by Jack DeJohnette. Motian had been drummer of Jarrett’s ‘American quartet’ (refer to The Survivors Suite and Eyes of the Heart), but hadn’t worked with Keith since that group’s dissolution. “Not only had I not played piano at the Deer Head for 30 years, but I hadn’t played with Paul Motian for 16 years. So it was like a reunion and a jam session at the same time”, wrote Jarrett in the liner notes to At The Deer Head Inn, the initial selection of material issued from this gig, in 1994.
Old friendships underlined the Deer Head project. The recording was initiated by Bill Goodwin, who had played drums on Gary Burton & Keith Jarrett (Atlantic) in 1970, before joining the Phil Woods Quartet, regulars at the Deer Head for many years. Goodwin proposed a documentary recording for Keith’s personal reference, but on listening Jarrett recognized “that this had to be released…. I think you can hear on this tape what jazz is all about.”
When At The Deer Head Inn was issued in 1994, the press agreed. “The music has the dash and the unabashed lyricism of Keith Jarrett’s best work,” wrote Stereophile. Gramophone, meanwhile, spoke of “spellbinding” playing, and the Los Angeles Times hailed “a compendium of grace”.
Thirty years later, it was time to revisit the material. Keith Jarrett and Manfred Eicher selected the eight previously unreleased pieces that comprise The Old Country, a second volume from the Deer Head performance.
Repertoire includes a double helping of Cole Porter with “Everything I Love” and “All of You”, Thelonious Monk’s “Straight No Chaser”, Jule Styne’s “I Fall In Love Too Easily”, Frank Churchill’s “Someday My Prince Will Come”, Gershwin’s “How Long Has This Been Going On”, Victor Young’s “Golden Earrings” and Nat Adderley’s “The Old Country.”
Track Listing:
1. Everything I Love (Cole Porter) 08:11
2. I Fall In Love Too Easily (Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn) 09:54
3. Straight No Chaser (Thelonious Monk) 08:51
4. All Of You (Cole Porter) 09:46
5. Someday My Prince Will Come (Frank Churchill, Larry Morey) 06:56
6. The Old Country (Nat Adderley) 12:54
7. Golden Earrings (Victor Young, Jay Livingston, Ray Evans) 08:25
8. How Long Has This Been Going On (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin) 08:32
Personnel:
Keith Jarrett: piano
Paul Motian: drums
Gary Peacock: double bass
Recorded September 16, 1992, at the Deer Head Inn
Engineer: Kent Heckman
Liner Photo: David W. Coulter
Design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Bill Goodwin
Review:
When he first played the Deer Head Inn, a romantic 1840s clapboard hotel on the edge of a Delaware national park, Keith Jarrett was 16, just out of high school and making $48 a week as a shipping clerk. But he was also a piano prodigy from the age of three, a classical recitalist before he was 10 and an intuitive improviser, too. He would regularly sit in at the Deer Head (often playing drums) until he left town to gig with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. As the music world knows, his 1975 solo improv performance on The Köln Concert became a multimillion seller, and made Jarrett a global jazz superstar.
But he never forgot the Deer Head, and in 1992, he returned to play a fundraiser for the jazz-devoted venue where he had once made music with friends and strangers just for fun. The Old Country is from the same gig as Jarrett’s 1994 release At the Deer Head Inn, similarly covering famous Broadway and jazz songs with subtly muscular regular bassist Gary Peacock, and the uncannily reactive, tonally delicate drummer Paul Motian (a unique Jarrett sidekick from the 1970s) deputising on this occasion for Jarrett’s regular Standards Trio partner, Jack DeJohnette.
That change, as well as the leader’s audibly evident delight in the place and the people, make these recordings special. Everything I Love is an unaccompanied whirl turning to entrancing swing, and Thelonious Monk’s Straight No Chaser is a blistering fusion of extended bebop improv and succinct, groove-mimicking phrasing. Jarrett’s Bill Evans roots are plain on All of You, and an initially pensive How Long Has This Been Going On turns into an impassioned onrush. Like its Deer Head predecessor, this set is song-based jazz-imagining at its best, though sceptics about Jarrett’s ecstatic background vocalising should note there’s plenty of that in here.
John Fordham (The Guardian)
