Ecm Records
2002
Rarum, Vol. 1: Selected Recordings
About This Album
The object of ECM's handsomely Digipak-aged Rarum series is to have its roster of artists -- past and present -- select their favorite performances on the label. Which leads to the next question: Is the artist always the best judge of his or her own material? With that in mind, Keith Jarrett's choices for his two-CD set, the first volume of this series, are sure to be some of the most interesting, wide-ranging, surprising, and controversial of the whole lot. Listeners have had fair warning -- ECM's previous Jarrett sampler, ECM Works, was also gleefully unpredictable -- but Rarum, Vol. 1: Selected Recordings gives you a much better idea of the staggering variety of Jarrett's interests over a 21-year span than the earlier disc. In his brief liner notes (it would have been nice to have had more memories about each of these selections), Jarrett confesses that he deliberately went for the esoteric; clearly the man is supremely confident that his fans will hear him out. Jarrett opens his treasure chest in a really eccentric way with three excerpts from his clavichord album Book of Ways -- two neo-Baroque, one a bit wearisome. There are no less than five rather engaging swatches from Jarrett's overlooked experimental Spirits album, where he overdubs himself on soprano sax, recorders, piano, and percussion.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10 and 11)

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

Disc 2 (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,7 and 9)

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.