Ecm Records
2003
Up For It (Live)
About This Album
For a trio that has been together this long (over 20 years), Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette still play with the enthusiasm of a group of people discovering each other for the first time. That's no cliché. One listen to "If I Were a Bell," the opening track on this live set, reveals how footloose, free, and excited these three can be when they encounter one another on the stand. Certainly, the near symbiotic relationship they have built over time makes the freewheeling feeling come easy. But that's a bit misleading in a sense, because if the listener pays the slightest bit of attention to how the rhythm section works with Jarrett, it becomes obvious just how much listening is going on in this conversation. Jarrett's timbral and dynamic palettes can change on a dime, and Peacock and DeJohnette never miss. The other wonderfully breezy thing about this set is that all of the tunes are from the jazz canon except for the title track, which closes the album and is a Jarrett original. From Frank Loesser's "If I Were a Bell," the band literally charges into Oliver Nelson's "Butch & Butch" at a furious tempo. DeJohnette pushes Jarrett on the tempo, and Peacock walks through the middle, balancing out not only time but harmonic equations in Jarrett's extrapolations on the melody.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,4,5 and 6)

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