ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to an analysis and critique of the idealized rhetoric of the pianist and composer Keith Jarrett, and that of his biographer Ian Carr and others. Notwithstanding Jarrett's musical achievements, the discursive positioning of his work invokes a range of problematic issues, including: notions of acoustic authenticity, involving a fundamentalist faith in the communicative power of the acoustic piano and a rejection of electric instruments; claims of divine inspiration, of being a “channel for the Creative,” and of achieving a “state of grace”; ideas of embodied performance, employed to justify Jarrett's bodily gyrations and vocalizing; recourse to outmoded nineteenth-century stereotypes of artistic genius and romanticized notions of the autonomous artist; associations with the masculinist philosophy of the poet Robert Bly, and his gendered concept of the Wild Man, which was central to the development of the controversial mythopoetic men's movement in the 1990s; and the employment of extravagant elemental rhetoric in descriptions of the recording of Jarrett's album Spirits, involving dubious assertions of “spirit communion,” thereby mobilizing fundamentally flawed, primitivist discourses of authenticity. Reviewing and assessing each of these issues in turn, the chapter concludes by arguing that Jarrett cannot remain insulated from convincing and compelling criticisms of these various discursive practices.
