Standards In Norway is a concert by Keith Jarrett's Standards trio, taped at the Oslo Konserthus on 7 October 1989. ECM kept it in the archive until April 1995. It catches the group six years into its life, playing eight songs from the American popular repertoire with the ease of musicians who no longer need to plan anything in advance.
The trio had first recorded standards in New York in January 1983, with Gary Peacock on double bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. The Oslo date belongs to the same October 1989 tour that produced Tribute, recorded at the Cologne Philharmonie a week later and released as a double album in 1990. Jan Erik Kongshaug engineered the concert and Manfred Eicher produced the release.
The programme alternates brisk tempos and long ballads, and half of the pieces run past ten minutes. Cole Porter's All Of You opens at a lively swing, while Rodgers and Hart's Little Girl Blue follows as a quiet ballad over brushes. The centre of the set is a pair of extended readings, Old Folks at almost eleven minutes and Dedicated To You at more than twelve, the longest track on the disc. Four titles also appear on Tribute: All Of You, Little Girl Blue, Just In Time and I Hear A Rhapsody. Played side by side, the two records show how the trio could reshape the same songs from one night to the next. How About You? closes the concert in under six minutes.
Reviewing it for Jazz Journal in October 1995, Michael Tucker called it "as straight a jazz set as Jarrett has recorded in recent years". He heard none of the modal originals and pedal-point vamps that stretch other Jarrett concerts of the period. He also wrote that "Peacock and DeJohnette are as one with the pianist, caught here at the top of his form". Tucker noticed the overlap with Tribute too, and judged that the differences in interpretation justified the release. Writing on the ECM Reviews site in 2012, Tyran Grillo singled out DeJohnette's drumming on Just In Time.
CD edition, ECM 1542, first released in 1995, with a running time of 73 minutes.
