Paris Concert documents a solo recital by Keith Jarrett at the Salle Pleyel on 17 October 1988, released by ECM in April 1990. It holds one continuous improvisation of almost forty minutes, named after the date of the concert, followed by two shorter pieces. Set beside the Köln concert, it shows a more compact and contrapuntal side of Jarrett's solo improvising, shaped by his work on Bach in those years.
The disc runs to about fifty minutes. After the long free-form piece come two shorter ones, a jazz ballad and a blues. The concert was recorded digitally by Peter Laenger and Andreas Neubronner and produced by Manfred Eicher. The cover photograph is by Jean-Pierre Larcher, in a design by Barbara Wojirsch.
The long improvisation opens in a slow, contrapuntal manner close to a prelude, with independent voices moving against each other. It then settles over a sustained low F. From there Jarrett builds dense chains of octaves and wide, ringing chords, before the texture opens again and the piece finds its way to a calm close. The Wind, a ballad by the jazz pianist Russ Freeman and lyricist Jerry Gladstone, starts from a quick, repeated figure and slows into a soft, bluesy reading of the tune. It ends in high, pattering notes that Tyran Grillo heard as falling rain. The closing Blues is Jarrett's own, in which Grillo found unexpected colours drawn from a standard progression.
In Stereophile, Richard Lehnert made it his Recording of the Month for November 1990. He heard traces of Jarrett's recent Bach playing in the opening section: "Never a contrapuntal slouch, Jarrett reaches new heights of grace, allusion, and determined development." He judged it Jarrett's most satisfying solo release since Concerts (1982), and described a closely miked recording, deep and lush in sound. Writing for ECM Reviews in 2012, Grillo called it "arguably the most stunning live recording in Keith Jarrett's solo archive."
This is the CD edition of ECM 1401, first released in 1990, with the improvisation indexed as a single track under the title October 17, 1988.
