At the Blue Note: The Complete Recordings documents three nights by Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio at the New York club in June 1994, six sets in full across six discs. Nothing was left out: every tune from every set is here, so the trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette can be heard as it worked in a club, set after set, rather than through a selection of highlights.
The trio played two sets a night on Friday 3, Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 June 1994, and each disc holds one set in its original running order. Jarrett plays piano, Peacock double bass and DeJohnette drums. Manfred Eicher produced, Jan Erik Kongshaug engineered, and Jarrett wrote the liner notes. The design is by Barbara Wojirsch, with photographs by Allan Titmuss.
Most of the repertoire comes from the American songbook and from bebop: Brubeck's In Your Own Sweet Way, Rollins's Oleo, Parker's Now's the Time, Monk's Straight, No Chaser, alongside ballads such as Skylark and Everything Happens to Me. Jarrett adds a handful of his own tunes, Bop-Be among them. The long pieces stand out. Autumn Leaves, which opens the Saturday first set, lasts more than 26 minutes. In You Don't Know What Love Is the standard opens into Jarrett's own Muezzin, which closes on a long playout that Jazz Journal heard as Indian-inspired. Similar extended medleys pair I Fall in Love Too Easily with The Fire Within (over 27 minutes) and On Green Dolphin Street with Joy Ride. Some tunes return on different nights, among them Partners, No Lonely Nights and Things Ain't What They Used to Be, so the same material can be compared in two readings.
Reviewing the engagement in The New York Times on 6 June 1994, Jon Pareles wrote that "Jarrett makes each new note sound like a discovery" and that the music "whispered and glimmered, seeking a pure, incorporeal song." Reviewing the box in Jazz Journal in 2019, Dave Jones wrote that few "would doubt his musical prowess, as demonstrated here."
This is the original six-CD box on ECM Records, ECM 1575-80, released in October 1995: six jewel cases, each with its own booklet, in a cardboard box with an additional booklet.
