Lloyd recognized Jarrett’s talent and was shrewd enough to know he needed to indulge the young pianist’s creative whims to keep him in the group. He gave Jarrett ample space to build solos live, and the band played a handful of his compositions alongside Lloyd’s. On Jarrett pieces like the buoyant gospel jam “Sunday Morning” from Love-In, distinctive elements that would crop up regularly in his solo work in the decade after—funky left-hand grooves paired with ringing, melodic, and instantly memorable right-hand leads—are easily identifiable.
Lloyd, who would later become a devotee of transcendental meditation, also made an impression on Jarrett’s spirituality, turning him on to the work of early 20th-century mystic George Gurdjieff. Besides his writing, Gurdjieff composed hymns for piano, and Jarrett would eventually cut an album’s worth of them for release by ECM in 1980. By that time, recordings of his solo concerts, especially 1975’s The Köln Concert, which went gold, had been so wildly successful he could record whatever he wanted.
But that was later. While Jarrett was still working with Lloyd, both he and DeJohnette caught the ear of Miles Davis, who was riding a wave of adulation and controversy following Bitches Brew and was putting together a band to take his new vision of jazz on the road. Jarrett was resistant to the idea of electric instruments, but after playing with the band in 1969, he quickly changed his tune, and he and DeJohnette were in the group and on record by the time of October 1970’s Miles Davis at Fillmore. While Jarrett was in Davis’ group, Eicher wrote asking if he would record for his new label, ECM. Where Miles was experimenting with density—more keyboards, more percussion, more electrification—Eichner’s label, as embodied by its famous motto, had a different ethos: “the most beautiful sound next to silence.”
Jazz was changing rapidly in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and by some measures it was in trouble. Rock and soul were ascendant in youth culture, jazz labels were struggling, and clubs were closing down. To adapt, many artists, following Davis’ lead, were incorporating rock rhythms and instrumentation into their music, and fusion would develop a healthy audience in the first half of the ’70s.
But labels also adapted to market pressures by issuing records that only made sense in a jazz context. The post-free-jazz avant-garde was well-established and flourished on smaller imprints and in communities like the loft scene in New York. It even made inroads with the majors, as with releases by the likes of Anthony Braxton, the Revolutionary Ensemble, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago on Arista, the A&M offshoot Horizon, and Atlantic.