[9] He performed in his first formal piano recital at the age of seven, playing works by composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Saint-Saëns, and ending with two of his own compositions.

[10] Encouraged by his mother, he took classical piano lessons with a series of teachers, including Eleanor Sokoloff of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

[17] Jarrett began to record his own tracks as a leader of small groups at first in a trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian.

Life Between the Exit Signs (1967), his first album as a band leader, was released by Vortex followed by Restoration Ruin (1968), which Thom Jurek of AllMusic wrote was "a curiosity in his catalog".

The Charles Lloyd Quartet with Jarrett, Ron McClure, and DeJohnette came to an end in 1968 after their recording of Soundtrack because of money disputes and artistic differences.

[23] Despite his growing dislike of amplified music and electric instruments within jazz, Jarrett continued with the group out of respect for Davis and because of his desire to work with DeJohnette.

[24] Jarrett performs on several Davis albums, including Miles Davis at Fillmore, recorded June 17–20, 1970 at Fillmore East in New York City, and The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, recorded December 16–19, 1970 at The Cellar Door club in Washington, D.C.. His keyboard playing features prominently on Live-Evil and he plays electric organ on Get Up with It.

[27] The group was often supplemented by an extra percussionist, such as Danny Johnson, Guilherme Franco, or Airto Moreira, and occasionally by guitarist Sam Brown.

Haden also produced a variety of unusual plucked and percussive sounds with his acoustic bass, running it through a wah-wah pedal for one track ("Mortgage on My Soul" on the album Birth).

During this time, Jarrett received a letter from producer Manfred Eicher asking if he would like to record for the relatively new ECM label.

[33] Their initial collaborations laid the groundwork for what would become known as the "European quartet", which also featured Palle Danielsson on bass and Jon Christensen on drums.

Jarrett recorded a few solo pieces live under the guidance of Miles Davis at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., in December 1970.

He has continued to record solo studio piano albums intermittently throughout his career, including Staircase (1976), Invocations/The Moth and the Flame (1981), and The Melody at Night, with You (1999).

In the liner notes to Vienna Concert, Jarrett named the performance his greatest achievement and the fulfillment of everything he was aiming to accomplish.

"I have courted the fire for a very long time, and many sparks have flown in the past, but the music on this recording speaks, finally, the language of the flame itself", he wrote.

In the late 1990s, Jarrett was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome[13] and was unable to leave his home for long periods of time.

The 2005 documentary The Art of Improvisation, broadcast on BBC Two on November 12, 2021 concluded with his trio performing a recognizable version of "Basin Street Blues".

The live recordings Inside Out and Always Let Me Go (released in 2001 and 2002 respectively) marked a renewed interest by the trio in wholly improvised free jazz.

By this point in their history, the musical communication among these three men had become nothing short of telepathic, and their group improvisations frequently take on a complexity that sounds almost composed.

[44] Luminessence (1974) and Arbour Zena (1975) both combine composed pieces for strings with improvising jazz musicians, including Jan Garbarek and Charlie Haden.

The Celestial Hawk (1980) is a piece for orchestra, percussion, and piano that Jarrett performed and recorded with the Syracuse Symphony under Christopher Keene.

In 1992 came the release of Jarrett's performance of Peggy Glanville-Hicks's Etruscan Concerto, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Most of Jarrett's classical recordings are of older repertoire, but he may have been introduced to this modern work by his one-time manager George Avakian, who was a friend of the composer.

He often played saxophone and various forms of percussion in the American quartet, though his recordings since the breakup of that group have rarely featured these instruments.

Jarrett lives in an 18th-century farmhouse in Oxford Township, New Jersey, in rural Warren County, where he uses an adjacent barn as a recording and practice studio.

His forebears were Christian Scientists, and though he endorses the core of the faith, he does not follow all its precepts, and also identifies with the Sufi tradition and mystical Islam.

[64] Jarrett's race has been a source of commentary by media and activists throughout his career,[65][66] as he has reported being recurrently mistaken as a black person.

In a 2000 interview with Terry Gross, Jarrett relates an incident at the Heidelberg Jazz Festival in the Rhine-Neckar region of Germany when he was protested by black musicians for something akin to cultural appropriation.

"[38][67] In a September 11, 2000 interview with Terry Gross, Jarrett revealed that chronic fatigue syndrome required him to radically overhaul his piano to have less breakaway keypress resistance in order for him to keep playing.

Although he has regained a limited ability to walk with a cane and can play piano with his right hand, he remains partly paralyzed on his left side and is not expected to perform again.