Sun Bear Concerts gathers five complete solo concerts that Keith Jarrett gave in Japan in November 1976, one city after another. It follows the Bremen, Lausanne and Köln recordings and extends their method to a whole tour. The set runs well over six hours, all of it made up on the spot, and it is the fullest picture of Jarrett as a solo improviser in the 1970s.
The concerts took place in Kyoto on 5 November, Osaka on 8 November, Nagoya on 12 November, Tokyo on 14 November and Sapporo on 18 November. Producer Manfred Eicher travelled through Japan with Jarrett. The recordings were made by the Japanese engineer Okihiro Sugano, with Shinji Ohtsuka also credited as engineer. The book-form packaging was designed by Barbara Wojirsch, with photographs by Klaus Knaup, Tadayuki Naitoh and Akira Aimi.
Each concert is in two long parts, between half an hour and three quarters of an hour each, and each begins from nothing prepared. The Kyoto first half, almost 44 minutes, opens the set; the Nagoya second half runs close to 40. No two evenings take the same path, though recurring figures and pianistic habits link them. Heard in sequence, the box becomes a close study of how Jarrett built large forms in real time, night after night. The three encores are brief by comparison, from about four to eleven minutes, and they close the set.
The original release was widely reviewed. In Down Beat in 1979, Neil Tesser wrote that Jarrett had "stepped into the cave of his creative consciousness and brought to light a music of startling power, majesty, and warmth." In Rolling Stone the same year, Mikal Gilmore called it "one of the few real self-contained epics in Seventies music." In his biography of the pianist, Ian Carr wrote that these marathons showed Jarrett to be one of the greatest improvisers in jazz, with a seemingly endless supply of rhythmic and melodic invention.
This is the six-CD box on ECM Records, catalogue number ECM 1100, first published as a ten-LP set in 1978. The five concerts occupy one disc each, and the sixth holds the encores from Sapporo, Tokyo and Nagoya, which were not on the original LPs.
