Invocations/The Moth and the Flame is a 1981 double album of improvised music performed by Keith Jarrett in two different sessions taking place in 1979 and 1980. Each album has a different approach, setting and conception. In Invocations (recorded at Ottobeuren Abbey, a Benedictine abbey in Ottobeuren, then part of West Germany), Jarrett plays soprano saxophone and pipe organ exclusively, while The Moth and the Flame (recorded at Tonstudio Bauer studios in Ludwigsburg, West Germany) is a solo piano suite. This double album was released by ECM Records in May 1981. Invocations was performed on the same organ that Jarrett used for Hymns/Spheres. Regarding the recording date, Jarrett recalled: "Just being in the abbey is quite a frightening experience... Everything I played... was extemporaneous, and the two tracks on which I did a soprano-sax over-dub were like minor miracles. It was about forty degrees in there, and my horn felt like an ice cube." Liner notes As in other of Jarett's albums, this album includes poetry in its liner notes. The included poem is "When things are heard" by Rumi, translated by Robert Bly, although the poem is attributed only to Bly. Reception The Allmusic review by Richard S. Ginell awarded the album 3 stars, noting: Writing for The New York Times, Stephen Holden commented that the album "finds the improvisatory pianist-composer at the peak of his powers", and that it offers "a striking aural clarity that is missing on even his most carefully recorded earlier albums. Clarity of tone and dynamic control have always been two of Mr. Jarrett's greatests assets as a pianist. And the new album reveals just how important hearing, as opposed to harmony and compositional structure, is to Mr. Jarrett's spiritually-attuned esthetic." Regarding "Invocations", Holden stated that it "conjures a dialogue between earthly and divine forces, as the saxophone calls forth the organ and the two instruments establish a call-and-response dialogue that contrasts the squealing, animal sounds of the horn with the solemn chords of the keyboard... the piece sustains a haunting spiritual atmosphere, while enabling Mr. Jarrett to summon aremarkable variety of sonorities from the two instruments." Concerning "The Moth and the Flame", he noted that it "consists of five discrete movements that are related stylistically. And the style has more to do with 19th-century Romantic piano literature than with the Bill Evans-influenced popjazz impressionism of earlier albums... The playing is seamless, with the