Keith Jarrett (AP Photo)

That night at America's most venerated concert hall, the rarely satisfied Jarrett felt a special interaction with his audience that he recalls experiencing only once before -- in 1975 at an opera house in Germany when he performed what would be released as "The Koln Concert," which sold more than 3 million copies to become the best-selling solo piano recording ever.

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"At Carnegie Hall when I walked out on stage, there was no doubt in my mind that these people were ready for whatever happened and that's not true of a lot of places I play," the 61-year-old jazz pianist said. "Carnegie Hall couldn't have happened without the audience. It wasn't like me tossing things out to them and them catching them. It was both directions all the time. ... I wasn't prepared for that kind of interplay ever happening between an audience and the stage. I've had great audiences but this was almost a small miracle. I've only felt this twice, once was in Koln and once was in New York."

Jarrett's audiences have always helped shape his spontaneously improvised solo concerts, and playing in his own country before 3,000 enthusiastic fans pushed him to create what turned into a musical autobiography, "a wide-angle look at what I do when I play alone."

Jarrett's performance can be heard in its entirety on the new double-CD, "The Carnegie Hall Concert," which is also the first U.S. solo concert he has ever released on record. The pianist takes his listeners on a musical journey that touches on blues, gospel, foot-stomping boogie-woogie, jazz ballads, dissonant contemporary music, romantic classical and folklike Americana. Among the five encores, Jarrett revisits two of his classic 1970s compositions, "Paint My Heart Red" and "My Song," and the standard jazz ballad "Time On My Hands."

"This one night I could just be myself," Jarrett said.

Jarrett's Carnegie Hall performance is all the more remarkable because in recent years he has completely revamped his whole approach to solo concerts as he battled to recover from chronic fatigue syndrome which nearly derailed his performing career.

In the early 1970s, just after his last sideman gig with Miles Davis' electronic jazz-fusion band, Jarrett pioneered a whole new solo piano concert format which won him international acclaim through such groundbreaking albums as "Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne" and "The Koln Concert."

Rather than play jazz standards or even his own compositions, Jarrett would start each concert with a blank canvas, with nothing planned beforehand, and fill it in with spontaneous uninterrupted freewheeling improvisations stretching out for up to an hour. But the solo concerts left him physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted.

Jarrett fell ill during a 1996 solo tour of Italy and was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. He spent nearly a year and a half as a virtual shut-in, before performing again with his trio in November 1998.

In 1999, he attempted two solo concerts in Japan, playing a series of short improvisations, but was dissatisfied with the results, expressing doubts at the time that he would return to the solo format because he found it too physically demanding.

Jarrett turned his main focus to the stellar trio he had formed in 1983 with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, which moved beyond its repertoire of jazz standards to playing spontaneous free improvisations on such recent albums as "Inside Out" and "Always Let Me Go."

Back home, Jarrett worked to regain his stamina with a regimen of medication, nutritional supplements, physical therapy and aerobics. His illness provided him an opportunity to critically analyze tapes of past solo performances which he found to contain a lot of excess, and he began practicing in his studio to develop a new solo concept.

"If I was going to do it again, I realized that I would have to undo everything I had previously done psychologically and emotionally," Jarrett said.

Jarrett drew on his experience playing classical music to free up his left hand to do more than just play bass lines or vamps like most jazz pianists. He credits his recordings of Mozart and Shostakovitch with improving his touch at the keyboard.

He also was inspired by physicist and software designer Stephen Wolfram's book "A New Kind of Science" to start removing some of the unwritten rules that had complicated his solo performances -- particularly his insistence on playing long continuous improvisations.

"I realized that perhaps I should stop and start instead of playing continuously," Jarrett said. "Now they can be long if that's what the material is telling me to do ... but if I end up discovering something that causes it's own completeness, I've given myself the ability to stop at the very moment it's complete instead of drawing it out."

Jarrett tried out his new ideas when he returned to Japan in 2002 for two solo concerts, resulting in last year's CD "Radiance," his first live solo recording since his illness, and a DVD "Tokyo Solo," released earlier this year. "Radiance" chronicled an Osaka concert divided into 13 pieces ranging in length from 73 seconds to 13 1/2 minutes that he found took on the structure of an improvised suite.

Jarrett found his Japanese audience so polite that "Radiance" ended up sounding "more like what I might have done in my studio." That wasn't the case at Carnegie Hall where the audience became an integral part of his performance.

In his capacity as producer, Jarrett decided to leave the extended applause uncut rather than lower the volume or shorten the ovations to preserve the "unique vibe."

"I started to realize that the yelling and the pounding ... the noises that the audience is making ... sound to me like modern music," said Jarrett. "I thought this is not exactly just applause, it has as much passion and color as a lot of music has."

For Jarrett, the concert's "crowning moment" comes during the first encore, a completely improvised hymnlike piece that he subsequently titled "The Good America."

"In the broadest sense it was longing for the world to not be what it was becoming," Jarrett said. "Every time I listen to that I have tears in my eyes ... There is unconsciousness in this country and consciousness and the good America is the awake America that we don't see on the news or very often anywhere."

Jarrett said the music shows that he's now completely over the illness and "feeling 100 percent." Since Carnegie Hall, he has been focusing again on solo concerts. He is looking ahead to two more solo concerts at Paris' Salle Pleyel starting Oct. 31 before playing several dates with his trio in Spain and Portugal in November.

For now, Jarrett says he has no plans to resume his classical recordings. "When I had chronic fatigue syndrome, I remember saying to myself if I ever get out of this and I'm ever able to play again, I am devoting myself to what I essentially am and that is a player and an improviser."

Two years ago, Jarrett became the only jazz artist besides Miles Davis to receive Denmark's Leonie Sonning Music Prize, one of the world's major music awards. Asked what he felt he shared in common with his former bandleader, Jarrett offered a succinct insight into what has made him one of the world's foremost pianists whether playing bebop, Mozart or spontaneous improvisations.

"We're never satisfied," Jarrett said. "The more merciless a critic you are of your own work the less you'll stay put in one place.

Keith Jarrett
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