Like the sinuous violin that links the movements of Rimsky-Korsakov's ‘Scheherazade Op. 35’, representing the voice of Scheherazade telling stories of the One Thousand and One Nights to the Sultan, Jarrett is a musical storyteller, his playing unique and immediately identifiable. His breakthrough came with a double album of solo piano improvisations performed at the Opera House, Cologne on 24 January 1975. Not only did Köln Concert establish his reputation with jazz audiences, it also extended his following beyond jazz. With sales of the album passing the million mark (to-date sales of the album are reputedly around four million), the demand for more concerts of spontaneously conceived music increased. “Those things are like commissioned works,” Jarrett told me in February 2009. “I'm paid to turn up and to create a brand new thing, that's the most serious thing I do in terms of focus and craziness and impossibility, and you don't know [in advance] if you have anything to show. People should know this.” Jarrett's harshest critic is Jarrett himself; a perfectionist, over the next 20 years he consciously set out to cleanse his playing of cliché, gratuitous flourish, predictability and phrases that fell easily under the fingers, observing, “If I don't let my fingers find things to play that I have never heard, I'm actually not satisfied. I have to play something that surprises me too,” as well as aiming to achieve greater clarity of expression, lucidity and focus in his inventions. He also became highly critical of his playing on the Köln Concert, as his mastery of long, spontaneously conceived solo improvisation grew. “I have a complex relationship with the Köln Concert,” he later told me. “I realise how first of all I didn't play the piano nearly as well, so if I listen as a pianist I don't hear touch the way I do now, I don't hear dynamics, I don't hear it coming out of my hands.” In October 1996, he recorded a series of concerts at his own expense during a tour of Italy and, listening to them in 2016, he came to a conclusion that represented a culmination of sorts, of much that he had been striving for. “I found I had been ‘prepared’ by all that came before, and remembered (with a shock) what all this stuff was about. It was about being conscious in the moment,” he says in the liner notes. Although he did not realise it in 1996, he now believes these concerts, which were the last long form improvisations – that is having no breaks within each set – he ever performed represented a “pinnacle” in his career. “One reason I know this is because, after waiting 20 years to give these concerts a serious listen again, there is no other reason I can give for the unbelievable experience I re-entered.” And yes, these concerts – at Modena, Ferrara, Torino and Genova – do indeed represent a career pinnacle in this most extraordinary of careers. There are periods of greater sustained invention than were ever apparent in Köln, a sense that each individual moment is leading to a greater whole, something that might be described as the narrative arc of the improvisation, is always, it seems, leading somewhere, yet there are also moments when subsidiary ideas and motifs are examined to create contrast or compliment what has gone before. There is a lot of music contained in this 4CD set, all of it demanding the most attentive listening and in return its openness, generosity of spirit and humanity providing the reward that comes with engaging deeply with music making at its highest level of creativity.