Bridge of Light (album)

• Keith Jarrett – piano (track 3)
• Marcia Butler – oboe (track 2)
• Michelle Makarski – violin (tracks 1 & 3)
• Patricia McCarty – viola (track 4)
• Thomas Crawford – conductor (tracks 1, 2 & 4)
  • The Fairfield Orchestra
    • Aloysia Friedmann, Cenovia Cummins, Mary Whitaker, Andrew Schaw, Alexander Vselensky, Heidi Modr, Christopher Cardona, Dana Friedli, Susan Lorentsen, Eric DeGioia, Roxanne Bergrman, Jeffrey Ellenberger, Amy Wright, Peter Kupfer – violins
    • Ah Ling Neu, Adrian Benjamin, KC Still, Caryn Briskin – violas
    • Ted Mook, Maureen McDermott, Benjamin Whittenburg – celli
    • Michael Magee, Neil Garber – basses
    • Adrianne Greenbaum – flute
    • Bendixen – horn
    • Susan Radcliff – trumpet

• Keith Jarrett, Manfred Eicher – producer
• Peter Laenger – tonmeister
• Barbara Wojirsch – cover design
• Gene Martin – photographer

Original notes by Keith Jarrett can be found in the CD issues:

Music programs are often rife with explanatory notes concerning the technical details of the pieces. This distracts us from entering the state of "listening" and, instead, makes us more likely to live in our head than in our heart. We seem more concerned with whether the program notes make sense than whether we can be touched by the sounds themselves.

Elegy for Violin was written for my maternal grandmother, who was Hungarian and loved music.

The Oboe Adagio was commissioned by the Pasadena Chamber Orchestra and had its first performance there. It juxtaposes pure melody with related counterpoint and is pastoral in essence.

The Violin Sonata was one of those pieces that tested the speed of my pencil against the incoming flow of ideas. In a way, the five movements are related by their seeming un-relatedness.

"Bridge of Light" was commissioned by Patricia McCarty and premiered with the orchestra you hear on this disc. The viola has a big heart and deserves more chances to show it. This piece is a sort of multi-cultural hymn and incidentally demonstrates my love of trumpet and strings.

Actually, all of these pieces are born of a desire to praise and contemplate rather than a desire to "make" or "show" or "demonstrate" something unique. They are, in a certain way, prayers that beauty may remain perceptible despite fashions, intellect, analysis, progress, technology, distractions, "burning issues" of the day, the un-hipness of belief or faith, concert programming, and the unnatural "scene" of "art", the market, lifestyles, etc., etc., etc. I am not attempting to be "clever" in these pieces (or in these notes), I am not attempting to be a composer. I am trying to reveal a state I think is missing in today's world (except, perhaps, in private): a certain state of surrender: surrender to an ongoing harmony in the universe that exists with or without us. Let us let it in.

– Keith Jarrett