Keith Jarrett was born May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to a mother of Slovenian-Hungarian descent and a father of French/Scots-Irish descent. He was a child prodigy in the fullest sense: piano lessons began at age three, he appeared on a Paul Whiteman television talent program at five, and he gave his first formal solo recital at seven, playing Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Saint-Saëns alongside two of his own compositions. He kept working as a professional musician through elementary school, picking up drums, vibraphone, and soprano saxophone along the way, and toured as a teenage piano soloist with Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians. After graduating from Emmaus High School in 1963, he enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston, left after a single year, and moved to New York in 1964, supporting himself playing Village Vanguard jam sessions. Drummer Art Blakey heard him at one of those sessions and hired him for the Jazz Messengers in 1965, Jarrett's first major professional credit.

The real launch came in 1966, when he joined saxophonist Charles Lloyd's quartet alongside drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Cecil McBee. The Lloyd Quartet was one of the biggest crossover successes in mid-1960s jazz — its 1966 album Forest Flower sold in numbers usually reserved for rock records, and Lloyd's tours (including an unusual run behind the Iron Curtain and slots at rock ballrooms like the Fillmore) put Jarrett in front of audiences far larger than jazz clubs normally drew. The group dissolved in 1968 amid financial and artistic disputes, but not before establishing Jarrett, still in his early twenties, as a name to watch.

Miles Davis noticed. After catching Jarrett at a New York club, Davis brought him into his touring band in 1970, initially alongside Chick Corea, then as sole keyboardist once Corea departed. Jarrett played electric piano and organ — reportedly both at once for stretches — through the loudest, most rock-inflected phase of Davis's career, documented on live albums including Live-Evil and the Cellar Door sessions. It was, by Jarrett's own later account, an ambivalent experience: invaluable exposure to Davis's instincts as a bandleader, but also his only sustained period playing electric instruments, a sound world he'd renounce almost entirely once he left the group in 1971 to pursue his own acoustic-jazz vision.

That vision took two parallel forms almost immediately. On the group side, Jarrett expanded a working trio he'd already been leading with bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian — dating to the late 1960s — into a quartet by adding saxophonist Dewey Redman in 1971. The "American Quartet" ran through 1976, cutting albums for Atlantic, Columbia, and Impulse! (Birth, Expectations, Fort Yawuh, Death and the Flower, The Survivors' Suite, Eyes of the Heart, Bop-Be) that fused hard bop, free improvisation, gospel-tinged melody, and elements of world music into something distinctly Jarrett's own. On the solo side, he began recording entirely improvised concerts for the newly founded German label ECM, starting with the studio album Facing You (recorded November 1971, released 1972) and the triple-LP Solo Concerts: Bremen / Lausanne (1973) — the format that would define his most famous work.

That format reached its peak on January 24, 1975, in Cologne. Jarrett arrived exhausted, in back pain after a five-hour drive from Zurich, to find that 17-year-old concert promoter Vera Brandes had been handed the wrong piano: a small, out-of-tune rehearsal instrument with sticking pedals and a thin upper register, not the Bösendorfer he'd requested. He nearly walked out; Brandes talked him into playing anyway. Working around the instrument's limitations — leaning on its middle register, riffing on left-hand ostinatos to compensate for weak bass — Jarrett improvised a 66-minute concert that became The Köln Concert (ECM, 1975), still the best-selling solo piano recording and one of the best-selling jazz albums of any kind in history. In 2025 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry as a work of lasting cultural significance.

Running alongside the American Quartet and the solo concerts was a third project, assembled at the suggestion of ECM founder Manfred Eicher: a "European Quartet" pairing Jarrett with Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, Swedish bassist Palle Danielsson, and Norwegian drummer Jon Christensen, active from 1974 to 1979. Its two studio albums, Belonging (1974) and My Song (1978), and the live Nude Ants (recorded 1979, released 1980) gave Jarrett's ECM output a more lyrical, folk-inflected counterweight to the American Quartet's grittier attack.

The 1980s brought the project for which Jarrett is now as often remembered: the "Standards Trio" with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette. The three had first played together on Peacock's 1977 ECM date Tales of Another; six years later Jarrett brought the same rhythm section into the studio under his own name for Standards, Vol. 1, Standards, Vol. 2, and Changes (all recorded January 1983, released 1983–85). At a moment when devoting a working band to the American songbook was considered artistically unfashionable, the trio's commitment to standards repertoire — reharmonized and stretched through open-ended improvisation rather than treated as nostalgia — proved durable: it toured and recorded for more than three decades, through live documents including Still Live (1988), Tokyo '96 (1998), Whisper Not (2000), My Foolish Heart (2007), and the archival After the Fall (recorded 1998, released 2018), effectively ending only with Jarrett's retirement.

Jarrett never fully set aside solo playing or classical repertoire during the trio years. He recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier, Handel and Mozart sonatas and concertos, and continued issuing solo concert recordings, including La Scala (1997) and, after a period sidelined by chronic fatigue syndrome in the mid-1990s, the hushed, ballad-focused The Melody at Night, With You (1999), recorded at home for his wife Rose Anne. His late-career solo concerts — Radiance (2005), Rio (2011), and Budapest Concert (recorded July 2016, released 2020) and Bordeaux Concert (recorded the same 2016 tour, released 2022) among them — stand as some of his final major statements as a performer.

In February 2018, and again three months later, Jarrett suffered two strokes that left him partially paralyzed on his left side. He spent from July 2018 to May 2020 in a nursing facility. He did not speak publicly about his condition until an October 2020 New York Times interview, in which he said, "I was paralyzed... At the moment I don't really see myself as a pianist." He has not performed publicly since, and by his own account is unlikely to again.

Jarrett's fully improvised solo concerts, developed without any prior compositional plan or motif sketched in advance, established an entirely new performance format within jazz piano — closer in spirit to structured meditation than to the head-solo-head convention he'd absorbed from Blakey and Lloyd. That same appetite for risk without a safety net shaped his other working bands: the American Quartet's blend of free playing and gospel-inflected melody, the European Quartet's spacious, folk-tinged lyricism (a sound Manfred Eicher's ECM production aesthetic helped define), and the Standards Trio's decades-long argument that interpretive depth on familiar songs could be as radical a statement as original composition. Classically trained from childhood, Jarrett moved between jazz improvisation and note-for-note performances of Bach, Handel, and Shostakovich without treating them as separate identities, and his refusal to repeat a solo concert twice — each one an unrepeatable, unplanned event — became as much a part of his critical reputation as any individual recording.