ECM Previews Keith Jarrett's 'Roma,' the Last Concert From His Final 2016 Solo Tour

ECM Records is previewing Roma, the last unreleased concert from Keith Jarrett's final European solo tour. On Oct. 26 the label shared "Roma, Part VI" on social media and pointed listeners to a full-page article about Jarrett and the album in La Lettura, the cultural supplement of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. The album is due Nov. 6 on CD, as a double LP and in digital formats.

Roma (ECM 2880) documents Jarrett's solo concert at the Santa Cecilia hall of Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica on July 12, 2016. ECM describes it as the fifth and final concert recording from the pianist's acclaimed last European solo tour of that summer. The earlier volumes were Munich 2016 (2019), Budapest Concert (2020), Bordeaux Concert (2022) and New Vienna (2025). According to KeithJarrett.org, which cited ECM when the album was announced in September, the tour's last night came four days after Rome, in Munich.

The program follows the pattern of Jarrett's later solo concerts: rather than one long improvisation, he played a suite of shorter, self-contained pieces. The album contains ten improvised parts, from just over four minutes to nearly 11, followed by two encores, Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "It's a Lonesome Old Town." The latter was released as a streaming single when the album was announced. KeithJarrett.org notes that he played both standards again in Munich on the tour's closing night.

In its notes for the album, ECM says Jarrett "builds momentum with dense chromatic lines" in the opening part before themes emerge. The label also points to a "swinging gospel" in "Part V," a "gritty blues" in "Part IX" and his habit of "stacking large arpeggiated harmonic arcs" in "Part VI," the track it has now released. It describes the whole concert as forming "one great architectural structure" and says each of the five tour concerts "revealed a distinct musical landscape."

The release completes a series that has gained extra weight because Jarrett no longer performs. In a 2020 interview with The New York Times, he revealed that he had suffered two strokes in 2018 that left him partially paralyzed on his left side, and said he did not expect to play in public again. That makes the 2016 tour, now fully documented, the last chapter of his solo concert work.

Jarrett, born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1945, has recorded for ECM since the early 1970s. His solo concert albums for the label, starting with Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne and The Köln Concert, are among the best-known recordings of improvised piano music. Roma brings the documented chapter of the 2016 tour to a close nearly a decade after the concerts took place.