Keith Jarrett - Koln Concert out on 96/24

I, too, love this masterpiece and listened to it endlessly in the early 80s. Powerful indeed, and one of the albums that I never tire of. One of the first two CDs I purchased. Let us know how the 96/24 sounds.

John

I own many recordings where musician(s) emit vocal utterances (Oscar Peterson as example), but Jarrett's grunts and groans irritate me enough that I sold off most of his recordings I owned. I like the simple melodies on the grunt-free studio recording 'The Melody at Night with You', but again irritated by Keith's self-criticism of his earlier recordings considering more accomplished pianists refrain from such self-loathing of their work.

Impactfull? Please, let's refrain form "NBA English" in this forum...

-RW-

I guess I did not really do the album justice by using (and misspelling) this term.

From www.urbandictionary.com:

1. impactful
September 23, 2009 Urban Word of the Day
A non-existent word coined by corporate advertising, marketing and business drones to make their work sound far more useful, exciting and beneficial to humanity than it really is. This term is most frequently used in "team building" seminars and conferences in which said drones discuss the most effective ways to convince consumer zombies to purchase crap they clearly do not need or even want.

Listened to the 96/24 version last night and was mildly disappointed about the improvement. On a positive note, I always thought the 35 year old recording was stellar on CD, and at par with far more recents recordings such as the Scala concert. On the negative side though, the 96/24 has a bit more bottom end frequencies and slighlty better focus, but it is not more "musical" and did not enhance the listening experience to me. For an example of state of the art (live) piano recording get Chich Corea Rendez Vouz in New York in multi channel SACD.

Thanks for the update on your impression of the new HD version. I have not downloaded any of the HD tracks yet but I am tempted to give them a try. The Koln Concert is a great recording and I was hoping to hear that the HD was a noticeable improvement. Keith Jarrett's grunts are sometimes a distraction but given the quality of his work I tolerate them for the most part. I have the majority of his recordings and his Koln Concert sparked my interest in Jazz many years ago. I listen to Jazz recordings more than any other genre so it was a watershed recording for me.
Thanks also to RW for informing us of his role in deciding what's acceptable on the forum.

Too bad they don't offer this wonderful recording in 24/192. I just don't hear that much of a difference between really great Redbook recordings, which Koln Concert is, and 24/96 - there are definitely subtle differences, but not so dramatic as when you listen to a great 24/192 recording (which can be simply magical).

Great (GREAT) album any way you slice it...

Good call Edorr

_Ben