No End by Keith Jarrett
No End consists of home recordings Jarrett made in 1986. What makes it (almost) unique, among his vast canon, is that for the most part, Jarrett plays drums, percussion, electric bass and guitar. These are non-composed vamps, very similar in tempo and feel, with no progression or development to speak of and with minimal dynamic variations. He is a good drummer, a competent bassist, but as a guitarist he could be described as primitive, naïve or at worst, amateur.
Recorded on two cassette decks with the simplest overdubbing techniques, at first the 90 minutes and 20 nameless tracks present something of a chore for the listener. In saying this, there are several key points giving essential relief, such as the beautiful cascading piano in Part X, or the cosmic Griot chanting in Part XVI. However, over repeated listens, the grooves sink in to the point of hypnosis – I’ve never had so much trouble evaluating a Jarrett record. It is obviously not intended for the casual listener – virtually any other Jarrett effort would be a better entry point, aside perhaps from 1985’s flute and sax-heavy overdub marathon, Spirits.
No End is dividing critical opinion as it was always going to, drawing comparisons to seventies Miles Davis, seventies Ornette Coleman, Krautrock, and particularly the psych-rock that Jarrett grew up with when he was wowing the caftan crowd with Charles Lloyd in the late sixties. Many have compared this to Jerry Garcia, especially his work outside the Grateful Dead, but as a longtime Dead-despiser, I won’t venture to comment on the veracity of that comparison.
So what to make of this? It’s an oddity but a charming one, and I can’t say you won’t need to work at it. But in an age where satisfaction is a swipe away there may be something to be said for having to work at it – consider your first listen the musical analogue of the first hundred pages of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, or whatever other favourite novel you wanted to rend, page from page, before it clicked for you.