Personal Mountains is a concert recording by Keith Jarrett's European quartet, taped in Tokyo in April 1979 and held back by ECM for a full decade before its release in 1989. It catches the group with Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen at the end of its five-year life, playing five Jarrett originals at length in front of a remarkably quiet audience.
The quartet had formed around the studio album Belonging in 1974 and went on to make My Song in 1977. The Japanese tour of spring 1979 and the Village Vanguard dates heard on Nude Ants were among its last work together. Jarrett plays piano and percussion, Garbarek tenor and soprano saxophones, Danielsson double bass and Christensen drums. Manfred Eicher produced, and Jan Erik Kongshaug engineered and mixed the tapes digitally at Rainbow Studio in Oslo. The booklet carries a German essay by Peter Rüedi with an English translation.
The title track opens the set at sixteen minutes, with Garbarek stating the theme on tenor and Jarrett soon taking over and pushing the rhythm section hard. Oasis, the longest piece at eighteen minutes, starts from soft piano runs before Garbarek brings in its melody and the band gradually builds. Prism and Innocence are slower and more lyrical, with the rhythm section sometimes dropping almost to a whisper behind the piano. Late Night Willie closes on a loose, bluesy groove that gives Garbarek room for a more soulful, earthy side of his playing.
The release was welcomed as a lost chapter of the band. Richard S. Ginell wrote at AllMusic that "clearly this is one of the peaks of the European quartet's discography." Writing for ECM Reviews in 2012, Tyran Grillo heard "a jewel of a live recording from Keith Jarrett's unparalleled European quartet" and pointed to the "rapt silence" of the Tokyo hall. In 2012 ECM drew a second album, Sleeper, from a concert at Nakano Sun Plaza on 16 April 1979 during the same tour, with several of the same pieces.
This is the CD edition of ECM 1382, first released in 1989, with a cover drawing by Rose Anne Colavito.
