Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[4]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[5]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings	[6]
Pitchfork	9.2/10[7]
The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide	[8]

In 1974, DownBeat ranked the album as the best jazz recording of the year[9]

The AllMusic review by Scott Yanow awarded the album 5 stars, stating, "Despite the length, the music never loses one's interest, making this an essential recording for all jazz collections".[4] Ted Gioia calls it Jarrett's "masterpiece", "two titanic improvised performances".[10]

According to Mikal Gilmore in Night Beat, "with Bremen-Lausanne and the subsequent Köln Concert, Jarrett found his niche, freely mixing gospel, impressionist, and atonal flights into a consonant whole".[11] Bill Dobbins notes that the (short) encore on the third side, a boogie-woogie inflected ostinato, owes much to Duke Ellington's New World A-Comin'.[12]

Writing for the now defunct jazz magazine Jazz.com, in December 2007 Ted Gioia rated the track "Bremen, Germany, July 12, 1973, Part I" 100/100, stating that:[13]

"Jazz musicians have always emphasized improvisation in their work. But few have taken this reliance on spontaneous creation to the lengths Keith Jarrett has assayed in his solo concerts. He pioneered the (still rare) concept of an entirely improvised piano recital, wholly inspired by the muse of the moment. But if the concept is exciting, Jarrett's execution of this ambitious idea is even more impressive. The ECM recording of Jarrett's 1973 Bremen concert represented the first attempt to capture this type of work on tape and present it on record. This disk may not have sold as well as The Köln Concert from 1975 or matched the scope of Jarrett's massive Sun Bear Concerts (originally released on ten LPs) from 1976, but for sheer musicality and inventiveness it is hard to top the recital in Bremen. Here is piano music that is rich in complexity, subtle in detail, and completely free of cliché. One of my desert island disks."

In 2023, Pitchfork's Mark Richardson described it as a "career-defining jazz masterpiece" and wrote that the "structural coherence of these lengthy improvisations across two one-hour sets is astonishing" and "where Jarrett's improvisational skill and talent might suggest music described as 'effortless,' some of the beauty of his solo piano work is that you can hear the exertion".[5]

Vinyl pressing

CD pressing

Recorded in concert in Bremen on July 12, and in Lausanne on March 20, 1973.

• Keith Jarrett – piano

Production

• Manfred Eicher and Keith Jarrett – producer
• Pierre Grandjean – recording engineer (Lausanne)
• Alan Kobel – recording engineer (Lausanne)
• Rolf Rockstroh – recording engineer (Bremen)
• Kurt Rapp, Martin Wieland – remix engineers
• Roberto Masotti, A. Raggenbass, Jochen Mönch – photography
• Barbara and Burkhart Wojirsch – cover design and layout