In the Light (Keith Jarrett album)

In 1984, in an interview with Art Lange for DownBeat Jarrett remarked how he conceived these pieces:

In the Light was a collection of pieces I wrote with no outlet at all. But we all have youthful flows of ideas at a certain stage of our lives, and whatever happens, happens in that period of time. What happened in that period for me was I was not working, I didn’t have a good instrument, I didn’t have a suitable place to live, and writing certainly made some sense. It was a way of expressing something.^[2]

In 1974, interviewed by Bob Palmer for DownBeat Jarrett emphasized the production process and how it felt working with Manfred Eicher:^[3]

I imagine I'm much more demanding in the studio than the average group leader, and compared to me, Manfred is a fanatic. When we were recording the solo piano pieces for In The Light, he spent an hour and a half moving the microphone millimeters in different directions. Manfred knows what he wants to hear and he will spend hours, days fixing a microphone, or go out and buy a new one. When we were doing In The Light, he went out and bought some small home speakers and put them in the next room, and during playbacks we individually would go in the other room to see how it would sound on somebody's home record player. Plus, he's working with Deutsche Grammophon engineers who… you heard the brass quintet on that album? There are over a hundred splices in that, all of them done just once, and you can't hear any splices.

In the original notes, Keith Jarrett states, "This is a collection of pieces written over a period of six years. It represents my more personal, perhaps even secret, until now, intentions in music."

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[4]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[5]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz	[6]
The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide	[7]

The AllMusic review by Richard S. Ginell awarded the album 3 stars, noting, "In this compendium of eight works for all kinds of ensembles, the then 28-year-old Jarrett adamantly refuses to be classified, flitting back and forth through the centuries from the baroque to contemporary dissonance, from exuberant counterpoint for brass quintet to homophonic writing for a string section."^[4]