All Keith Jarrett solo concerts started the same way: he walked on with nothing written, sat down and played until something happened. He did it for more than forty years, and one of those nights, in Cologne in 1975, produced The Köln Concert, a record that has sold close to four million copies and is often called the best-selling solo jazz album ever.
Köln was only one night in a project that ran from the early 1970s until his last public performance at Carnegie Hall in February 2017. In between, Jarrett played concert after concert around the world with no prepared material, and ECM released a long run of them.
Two strokes in 2018 left Jarrett unable to play, and he confirmed in 2020 that his performing career was over. Since then, ECM has continued to open its archive, most recently with New Vienna, released in 2025 to mark his 80th birthday. The result is a body of work that’s daunting to approach: dozens of discs, many of them double or triple sets, all built on the same basic premise.
So where do you go after Köln? Here’s our ranking of twelve Keith Jarrett solo concerts on record. (For his trio, quartet and studio work, see our guide to 10 essential Keith Jarrett albums.)
1. The Köln Concert (1975)
There’s no getting around it. Recorded at the Cologne Opera House on 24 January 1975, in a late-night slot arranged by 17-year-old promoter Vera Brandes, The Köln Concert was played on the wrong piano: a small, worn Bösendorfer instead of the concert grand Jarrett had requested, with weak upper registers and a thin bass.
Exhausted and in back pain, Jarrett responded by staying in the middle of the keyboard and leaning hard on rhythm: rolling left-hand ostinatos, gospel-tinged vamps and long, singing melodies. The limitation became the style.
It’s the most immediately accessible thing he ever recorded, and there’s a reason it remains the gateway. If you’ve only ever heard the famous opening, listen to Part II from start to finish.
2. Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne (1973)
Released as a three-LP set barely two years into Jarrett’s relationship with Manfred Eicher’s ECM, Bremen/Lausanne was the record that established the fully improvised solo concert as a viable album format.
Many longtime fans prefer it to Köln. The pieces are longer and more searching, moving between folk-like hymns, rhapsodic romanticism and passages of churning, almost trance-like repetition. It’s less polished and more exploratory, and you can hear Jarrett discovering what the format could hold.
Start here if Köln left you wanting something with more grit.
3. Vienna Concert (1992)
Recorded at the Vienna State Opera in July 1991, this is the solo concert Jarrett seemed proudest of, writing that after years of “courting the fire”, this music spoke “the language of the flame itself”.
It came at the end of a period in which he’d been recording Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Goldberg Variations, and that immersion shows. The playing is more contrapuntal and architecturally clear than the 1970s concerts, with long lines built up voice by voice, but it never loses its emotional heat.
Two long pieces, one beautifully recorded piano, and arguably the peak of his long-form approach.
4. Radiance (2005)
Recorded in Osaka and Tokyo in October 2002, Radiance marks the biggest change in Jarrett’s solo practice. After recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome in the late 1990s, he abandoned the hour-long arcs of his earlier concerts and began each piece from a completely blank slate.
The result is a sequence of shorter, sharply contrasting improvisations, some atonal and abrasive, others delicate and hymn-like. It can be a challenging listen if you’re expecting Köln, but it’s one of his most adventurous records and set the template for everything he did on stage afterwards.
5. Sun Bear Concerts (1978)
Ten LPs drawn from five concerts across Japan in November 1976, Sun Bear Concerts is the most ambitious release of Jarrett’s career, and possibly the most ambitious solo piano release by anyone.
Inevitably, it’s uneven. But at its best it captures Jarrett at the height of his 1970s powers, with long, patient improvisations allowed to unfold over half an hour or more. It’s a box to explore over weeks rather than in a single sitting, and the rewards are considerable for anyone who already loves Bremen and Köln.
6. Paris Concert (1990)
Recorded at the Salle Pleyel in October 1988, Paris Concert is anchored by a single long improvisation that opens in something close to a Baroque idiom before gradually finding its way into more familiar Jarrett territory.
It’s followed by two shorter pieces, including a blues, that hint at the more varied concert structures he’d adopt later. More concentrated than many of his concert releases, it’s a good choice for listeners who find the multi-disc sets intimidating.
7. Testament: Paris / London (2009)
This three-disc set from concerts at the Salle Pleyel and London’s Royal Festival Hall in late 2008 is the most emotionally raw entry in Jarrett’s catalogue.
His own liner notes describe a period of profound personal upheaval, and the music doesn’t hide it. There’s anger and dissonance here, but also some of the most tender, exposed playing of his late career. It’s not an easy record, but it’s one of his most human.
8. Rio (2011)
If Testament captured Jarrett at a low point, Rio, recorded at the Theatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro in April 2011, sounds like the opposite: buoyant, warm and generous.
Across fifteen pieces, he moves through gospel, folk-like melodies, free passages and lyrical ballads, and the sequence holds together unusually well. Of the post-Radiance concerts, this is probably the friendliest place to start.
9. La Fenice (2018)
Recorded at Venice’s Gran Teatro La Fenice in July 2006 but held back for more than a decade, La Fenice stands out for how freely Jarrett mixes his own improvisations with outside material.
Alongside the free pieces, he plays “The Sun Whose Rays” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, “My Wild Irish Rose” and “Stella by Starlight”, and the contrast between the spontaneous and the familiar gives the concert a lovely shape.
10. Budapest Concert (2020)
Jarrett’s final European solo tour in July 2016 has so far yielded four albums, and Budapest, recorded at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall, is the strongest of them.
Released in 2020, around the time Jarrett revealed he would never perform again, it carries an inevitable poignancy. But the music itself is assured and varied, closing with two standards, “It’s a Lonesome Old Town” and “Answer Me”, played with real tenderness.
11. Dark Intervals (1988)
Recorded at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall in April 1987, Dark Intervals is often overlooked, but in hindsight it’s one of the most interesting records on this list.
More than a decade before Radiance, Jarrett was already experimenting with shorter, self-contained pieces rather than one continuous improvisation. The playing is darker and more classical in mood than the 1970s concerts, and it fits on a single disc, making it an easy record to return to.
12. New Vienna (2025)
The fourth release from the 2016 European tour, after Munich 2016, Budapest Concert and Bordeaux Concert, New Vienna was recorded in the Goldener Saal of the Musikverein on 9 July 2016 and issued by ECM in May 2025 to mark Jarrett’s 80th birthday.
Its title nods to the 1991 Vienna Concert, recorded in the same city almost exactly 25 years earlier, and the comparison is revealing. Where the earlier concert was built from long, unbroken arcs, this one moves restlessly between short, contrasting pieces, before closing with “Over the Rainbow”, a longtime favourite in his solo sets.
It’s one for those already deep into his solo work rather than newcomers, but as possibly the last word from his final tour, it’s a moving document.
Where To Start With Keith Jarrett Solo Concerts
If you’ve only heard Köln, go back to Bremen/Lausanne for the raw origins of the format, then forward to the Vienna Concert for its most refined form. If you want to hear how Jarrett reinvented the idea later in his career, Rio is the most welcoming of the later concerts and Radiance the most daring.
And if you’d like to get inside the music at the keyboard, our collection of Keith Jarrett transcriptions is a good place to begin.
Featured image: ABC/Impulse! Records, Public domain, adapted, via Wikimedia Commons
