The Old Country, subtitled More from the Deer Head Inn, brings eight previously unreleased performances from a single night in September 1992. On that evening Keith Jarrett returned to the small Pennsylvania club where he had played as a teenager, with Gary Peacock on double bass and Paul Motian on drums. It was the only time this trio ever played together. The first selection, At the Deer Head Inn, came out in 1994, and this second volume arrived thirty years later.
The Deer Head Inn, in the Delaware Water Gap, has presented live music since 1950, and in 1961 it gave the 16-year-old Jarrett his first gig as leader of a piano trio. When the owners retired and passed the club to their daughter and son-in-law, he offered to play there again. Word of mouth was enough to pack the room on 16 September 1992. Peacock was then a member of the Standards trio with Jack DeJohnette. Motian had not worked with Jarrett since the American quartet broke up about sixteen years earlier. The drummer Bill Goodwin, a Deer Head regular, produced the recording, made by Kent Heckman as a reference tape. Jarrett later decided it should be heard, and the material was chosen with Manfred Eicher.
Jarrett called the night "a reunion and a jam session at the same time", and the repertoire is all standards and jazz tunes. I Fall in Love Too Easily opens with a solo piano introduction before the trio enters. On Monk's Straight No Chaser Peacock takes a rhythmically varied solo, while Motian keeps things spare and uses the hi-hat to great effect. The title track, Nat Adderley's The Old Country, runs almost thirteen minutes in a relaxed, bluesy reading. Gershwin's How Long Has This Been Going On closes the set in a mood of melancholy romanticism.
In The Guardian, which made it jazz album of the month, John Fordham called the set "song-based jazz-imagining at its best". Michael Tucker wrote in Jazz Journal (2024) that "there's not a moment in these 74 or so minutes which will not bring a smile to your face". Critics in Jazz Magazine and the German press noted how Motian's straight-ahead, old-school playing shifts the balance away from the familiar Standards trio sound.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2828, released on 8 November 2024, with liner notes by Keith Jarrett and Manfred Eicher.
