After one of our recent shows, I think in Boston, Gary came up to me and said, "I thought I had experienced the epitome of swing. I was completely mistaken. This was the most swinging thing I've ever experienced in my whole life."

The trio can go literally any place, and we do, in concert. Once we're inside a tune, we can do anything with it. We can end up playing completely outside, then we can play something completely familiar. We can play time, or no time. And in the rare cases where playing standards doesn't work, we don't have to do that either. We ended up in a hall last summer where the standards didn't sound good in the room. So I said, Let's not do this. So we didn't. We played a whole concert where there was no tune.

The first time I ever saw you perform, in Milwaukee in 1974, you were opening for Larry Coryell's electric fusion band, and not happy about it. You said some angry words to the audience from the stage. Any recollection of this?

Oh, that was with the quartet, right? And that was when Coryell was playing with the Eleventh House? That was not a well-planned thing. We were supposed to headline, but how were we supposed to come on after that? What were we suppose to do, come out and sound really tiny? So we changed the order.

When you're up against an electric band like that, it's like you're on two separate planets. We wanted to make use of air, and they were using wires. It's like a toxic exercise. I actually get a metallic taste in my mouth when I think about electric music. That's why I don't like recording studios -- except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.

I can't even tolerate my own playing on electric keyboards. It's not about the musical ideas -- the sound itself is toxic. It's like eating plastic broccoli. I don't know any jazz pianist who mainly plays electric who goes back to acoustic playing and sounds like they should be playing acoustic.

Even Herbie Hancock?

Yes. I'm not talking ideas, or even presentation. It's like in politics: You have to sell something to become an electric player -- like your skin or your heart.

With acoustic piano there's so much more of a tactile response, so much more life in it. There are so many different ways of touching the acoustic piano, getting different sounds out, that I can't imagine why anyone would leave it. If you're a player, you don't have enough time in your life to leave it.

But you don't regret playing all that electric music with Miles Davis?

Well, the power of what we were trying to do was there. Just the instruments sucked. I don't think I could have done it if I didn't also have an acoustic band going at the same time. And I knew it wasn't gonna last. We would put cotton in our ears every night -- Jack and I -- we couldn't stand the volume.

But they're gonna release the Cellar Door dates at Columbia, so you'll be able to hear at a good length what we sounded like. These were the gigs that most of the cuts on "Live Evil" were taken from. The Cellar Door in Washington in 1970. I think they're gonna release six CDs next fall. [Note: the personnel of the Miles Davis Band then was Davis, trumpet; Gary Bartz, saxophone; Michael Henderson, electric bass; DeJohnette, drums; Airto Moreira, percussion; Jarrett, keyboards and John McLaughlin guesting on guitar.]

We were a lot freer than "Live Evil" sounds like we were. And the first four CDs will be without John [McLaughlin], because John wasn't in the band. You wouldn't know that from "Live Evil," but John only played with us one night. I think it was a marketing concept to add electric guitar. It kind of threw a curve ball into the band. I wasn't sure -- nobody was sure -- what the rules were.

How did you come to join Davis' band?

Well somehow Miles heard about me. In the mid-'60s I brought a trio into this tiny club in Paris. It maybe held 10 people. The band was Aldo Romano [drums] and J.F. Jenny-Clarke [bass]. I would have brought Charlie and Paul [bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian, with whom Jarrett mainly played in the late '60s and '70s], but I couldn't afford to take them. So, anyway, we're playing in this tiny club, and one night Miles walks in with his whole band. And he says [Jarrett imitates Davis' rasp], "I want these guys to hear this."

When I was in the band Miles asked me once, "How do you play from nothing?" Because sometimes I would just play solo. I said, "I don't know. I guess if I knew I'd be in trouble."

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