CD ECM Records Keith Jarrett: Hymns / Spheres

Septembrie 1976

Keith Jarrett

AllMusic:
"Restlessly searching out new territory for improvisations, Keith Jarrett tackles the massive Karl Joseph Riepp "Trinity" Baroque pipe organ at the Benedictine Abbey in Ottobeuren, Germany. He starts out with a pastoral "Hymn of Remembrance," then embarks upon a long nine-movement series of "Spheres" before closing with a grand "Hymn of Release." The devotee of Jarrett's piano will quickly discover that his organ idiom has nothing to do with his piano performances; he likes slow-moving, pulseless, sometimes dissonant, sometimes reverent or ecstatic smears of sound (which makes practical sense in the hugely reverberant churches where pipe organs are found). In the ninth movement, Jarrett can fool you into thinking that he is playing floating electronic space music (on an 18th-century organ!). Yet if one must apply a category, despite the improvisatory element, this double-CD is contemporary classical organ music, much closer to that of Olivier Messiaen than anything in the jazz world -- and only intermittently as striking. (Note: on the single CD issue, only "Spheres" is listed)."



From May through September 1976, Keith Jarrett made three of his finest, most dauntingly uncompromised solo recordings: Staircase, Sun Bear concerts, and the least well known, Hymns Spheres, not released in full on CD until now: two discs’ worth of improvisations on an 18th-century baroque pipe organ, recorded in a German abbey. This is not jazz or gospel or romantic or solo-piano music that happens to be performed on a big organ. Jarrett works from the sound out, or in, the music’s shape and substance determined by the organ’s sonorities, dynamic range, and virtually infinite capacity to sustain – and by the hall itself, a vast basilica with a reverberation time of six seconds. You can hear Jarrett listening to the yawning silences as they slowly fill with and empty of sound. And by pulling out some stops only halfway, he even bends notes. [...] the pace, when there is one, is slow, almost static, sometimes reminiscent of the electronic ambiences of Eno and Roach. But these are ambiences that refuse to yield to the foreground of the listener’s attention, and the sound is rich and full, ECM’s trademark sense of spaciousness for once not electronic at all. It’s wonderful to finally have some of the loneliest, most haunting music I know all in a print again on these beautifully remastered CDs.
Richard Lehnert, Stereophile

Keith Jarrett was only a year removed from The Köln Concert – which became the best-selling album in jazz history to that time – when in 1976 he released Hymns/Spheres, a two-LP solo album recorded on the Karl Joseph Riepp ‘Trinity’ Baroque pipe organ at the Benedictine Abbey in Ottobeuren, Germany. This new two-CD reissue marks the first time that ECM has released the recording in its entirety on compact disc. [...] Jarrett’s facility on the instrument is mighty, and his classical sensibility is unimpeachable. The program consists of the nine-movement Spheres bookended by ‘Hymn of Remembrance’ and ‘Hymn of Release’, all of it unfolding slowly and orchestrally: Jarrett obviously enjoys the instrument’s capability to fill the cavernous basilica, and milks all available sonic features. The end result is stately music that serves to add to our admiration of him as an indefatigably intrepid artist.
Jeff Tamarkin, Jazz Times