Staircase," "Hourglass," "Sundial" and "Sand," the four studio improvisations that make up this two-record set, represent exquisite additions to Jarrett's ECM catalog of salon music for solo piano. Among contemporary composer/performers, Jarrett exploits with unequaled sophistication the chromatic lyricism which has descended from Chopin, through Debussy and Prokofiev and for which the highbrow concert audience perpetually starves. But in Jarrett's music, it becomes the basis of a cool modernism that reflects spiritual impulses more than emotional ones.

Practiced by a lesser artist, Jarrett's eclecticism would add up to little more than a genteel pastiche. But Jarrett's inexhaustible inventiveness and ability to maintain a facade of compositional structure are the foundation of an integral style. Too diffuse for strict academics, too cerebral for jazz buffs, Jarrett's ECM music defines a sort of MOR jazz-classical fusion that finally seems better suited to short forms than to the epic sprawl of his live solo concerts. By integrating the openendedness found in the trance music of LaMonte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich within a European harmonic scheme, he romanticizes the exercises in thematic mutation and timelessness of those composers, while retaining their sense of meditative austerity.

Jarrett reaches a peak of eloquence in the second section of "Hourglass," where a wandering nocturnal theme, two parts Fauré to one part Bill Evans, gradually kaleidoscopes into a fragile, repetitive motif, then returns to its original form like the folding and opening of a flower. This piece alone reaffirms Jarrett's position as contemporary music's foremost elegist. (RS 251)

STEPHEN HOLDEN