Always Let Me Go by Jarrett, Peacock and DeJohnette

Jazz Albums round-up

Whether we really need another live album by the trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette is open to question, especially when it's a 2CD-set that clocks in at a whopping two hours and 17 minutes. Since its inception 20 years ago the trio has recorded more live albums than the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead combined; if you include Jarrett's old solo projects such as the 10-volume Sun Bear Concerts and the justly famous The Köln Concert, it's probably possible to spend a whole week – night and day – listening to nothing else.

So what's new about Always Let Me Go (ECM), recorded live in Tokyo in April 2001? It's not another set of "standards", for a start. Following on from last year's release, Inside Out, a document of the great RFH concerts the trio gave in London in 2000, the latest album is dedicated to what Jarrett refers to as "free music that was not written, rehearsed or planned in advance of the performances". Accordingly, the two CDs consist of eight new pieces, with Jarrett given sole composer's credit for six of them, and the trio for the remaining two. While the opening track relates most obviously to received notions of "free music", with Jarrett's fingers flying across the keyboard in a series of nervous, knuckle-edged Cecil Taylor-isms (a style that now sounds entirely historical, like Dixieland), it soon develops a stately beauty that is essence of Jarrett. Here, as in most of the album, the grace with which the three musicians negotiate changes of mood and tempo is close to staggering. In "The River", which follows – a tender ballad whose brief, three-minute lifespan one wishes to prolong indefinitely – and the limpid "Tributaries", which follows that, it's clear that what we're hearing is vintage Jarrett.

It's a feeling that the second CD does nothing to dispel. This isn't just good jazz; this is music on a completely different plane. The beginning of the opener, "Waves", is close to perfect, sounding as poised as a Beethoven sonata before turning all Bud Powell and boppish (and then occasioning a long drum solo – the only moment I could have done without). On an uncredited sleeve-note that one presumes was written by Jarrett himself, the poetically inclined author conjures up a mythological, misty-mountain landscape, in which it occurs to him that: "This was no ordinary moment. Nor were any of the preceding ones going back as far as he could remember, now that he thought about it." Always Let Me Go is no ordinary album. Those of us who thought we had all the live Jarrett albums we needed will have to think again.

Charles Lloyd – with whose quartet Jarrett played in the late Sixties – is another ECM artist undergoing a kind of renaissance. But while Lloyd's recent ECM releases have marked a continual refinement of his tenor saxophone playing, the phrases of which now sound as ineffably "right" as Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young, his latest release, Lift Every Voice, could perhaps have done with tighter editing. Again a double CD set, the album carries a heavy subtext: this is Lloyd's "September 11" album, a date that also marks what was meant to be the opening of his week's engagement at the Blue Note club in New York. The second album is the more successful, with Lloyd emoting grandiloquently on threnodies made from the bones of "Go Down Moses", "Wayfaring Stranger", "Deep River" and the title track. Lloyd sounds great throughout, but there's too much of John Abercrombie's guitar-playing for my taste.