In the mid-1970s Keith Jarrett wasn’t just a popular jazz pianist. He was a genuine phenomenon so astoundingly productive that he put his era-defining “American Quartet” with saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian on hiatus to pursue an entirely different group sound and repertoire.
He launched his “European Quartet” with 1974’s “Belonging,” an album that introduced at least three tunes that became standards and another that served as the melodic blueprint for the title track of Steely Dan’s 1980 album “Gaucho” (which led to a lawsuit settled with a co-composer credit for Jarrett).
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Featuring Norwegians Jan Garbarek (tenor sax) and Jon Christensen (drums), and Swedish bassist Palle Danielsson, the gospel-tinged “Belonging” was catnip for artists growing up in the 1970s like Branford Marsalis, who included a rollicking 12-minute version of Jarrett’s “The Windup” as the closing track on his 2019 quartet album “The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul.”
Once the tune was in the band’s repertoire, the quartet’s bassist Eric Revis said, “We should record the whole (expletive) record,” Marsalis recalled. “But then the pandemic said, ‘No!’” And by the time the quartet was back on the road in the fall of 2021 it was sounding rusty.
“It took eight months to get our thing back,” said Marsalis, 64. “We played SFJAZZ and by the third night the vibe between us was coming back. We were not going to record until we started sounding good again.”
Mission accomplished. Finally back in the studio, they interpreted Jarrett’s classic album track for track, and the Branford Marsalis Quartet’s March 28 release “Belonging” marks the saxophonist’s Blue Note Records debut.
Featuring Revis, pianist Joey Calderazzo and drummer Justin Faulkner, the quartet returns to the Bay Area for a series of concerts, including two shows March 10 at Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center; March 11 at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage; and March 12 at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall (presented by Stanford Live).
The albums provide a fascinating contrast between two celebrated ensembles at very different points in their trajectories. The newest member of Marsalis’ quartet is Faulkner, who’s held down the drum chair since he turned 18 in 2009. Calderazzo joined in 1998, the year after Revis signed on, and the group has earned distinction as one of the most muscularly cohesive on the scene.
While they’re interpreting another quartet’s album, “this group is not ever going to try to sound like another group,” Calderazzo said. “We just took this music and played it like we wrote it. I did my best to not even listen to the record for a while, knowing we were going to do this.”
On the other hand, Jarrett’s quartet is clearly getting to know each other on “Belonging,” a process evident on a YouTube video recorded in Hanover, West Germany, in 1974 “that shows they didn’t know the music that well,” Marsalis said.
But what caught his ear as an adolescent was Jarrett’s force as a leader, using the piano to “instruct them what to do and how to do it,” he said.
“I think that’s one of the reasons Keith veered away from the band with Dewey and Paul. They were already established and a lot of the time they valued their ideas over his. That’s ultimately why he needed to find musicians who would really follow him.”
Ultimately Jarrett found his greatest success by himself. January marked the 50th anniversary of his solo Köln Opera House performance documented on the ECM double album “The Köln Concert.” With more than four million copies in print, it’s the best-selling solo album in jazz history.
For the rest of the decade Jarrett alternated solo tours and albums with his American and European quartets, though after 1983 he worked mostly with his “Standards Trio” featuring bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette. A series of strokes led to his 2018 retirement from performing, and the Marsalis Quartet’s “Belonging” is well-timed to remind jazz lovers of Jarrett’s lamented absence on the cusp of his 80th birthday May 9.
Jazz musicians increasingly interpret his compositions, but his influence as a player has long been unavoidable. For Calderazzo, 59, “Keith came later,” he said, after he gravitated toward players who preceded Jarrett in trumpeter Miles Davis’s band, such as Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, and Herbie Hancock.
“It’s hard to be a modern jazz musician and not listen to Keith,” he said. “Even when he’s not soloing, he’s the guy leading the quartet. It’s the way he playing through the song. The group is more or less following him and improvising.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET
When & where: 7 and 9 p.m. March 10 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz, $31.50-$84, www.kuumbwajazz.org; 8 p.m. March 11 at Freight & Salvage, Berkeley, $84-$89, www.thefreight.org; 7:30 p.m. March 12 at Bing Concert Hall, Stanford University, $25-$135, live.stanford.edu.
