After the Fall is a fascinating fly-onthe-wall document of Jarrett making his return to public performance on 14 November 1998 after taking two years out to recover from chronic fatigue syndrome. It was his first concert since the 1996 Italian solo performances that were subsequently released as A Multitude of Angels in 2016. Taking things cautiously, he opted for a venue not too far from where he lived – the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, NJ – to remove the burden of travel, wanting to arrive fresh and ready to concentrate on the task ahead. Uncertain of whether he could even do a full concert, his choice of tunes reflects the open mind with which he approached the concert, telling his trio, “For me, bebop might be the best idea because, although it requires great technique, I don't think I needed to play as hard as I often did (as my energy seemed too low to ‘dig in’ too much).” Some tunes he must have learned in his teenage years before he went to Berklee, so it is fascinating to hear one-off performances of Sonny Rollins' ‘Doxy’, Charlie Parker's ‘Scrapple from the Apple’ and Coltrane's ‘Moment's Notice' treated with the kind of respect normally reserved for a Cole Porter or Richard Rogers standard. The sparking melodic wonders these musicians unearth from within such familiar harmonies is totally absorbing. Throughout, Jarrett's playing is exhilarating – the more he plays, the more he realises he can play. It's November, so he impishly includes ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’, and as he gathers confidence, there are standards such as ‘The Masquerade Is Over’, ‘When I Fall in Love’, ‘I’ll See You Again' and ‘Autumn Leaves’, where he leaves the AABC form, inserting a single chord vamp for an extended extemporisation in the same way Ahmad Jamal did on the song in Portfolio of Ahmad Jamal, a double-album set Jarrett bought as a young teenager. After the Newark concert, Jarrett experienced some relapses, but he was on a rising graph of recovery.