The American poet Robert Bly is perhaps best known for his book Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), which spent over a year on the New York Times Best Seller List and became a central text in the development of the controversial ‘mythopoetic men’s movement.’ The inclusion of a poem by Bly as part of the package for Jarrett’s Vienna Concert (1992) opens up the possibility of an interpretation of the pianist’s artistic approach that has seldom been discussed in the literature: namely, a masculinist reading, situating Jarrett’s aesthetic practice within the conceptual framework provided by Bly’s problematic theories of contemporary manhood. One of the most obvious points of connection between Bly’s philosophy and Jarrett’s performance practices is to be found in the latter’s Spirits (1986), a project in which the primitivist rhetoric of both Jarrett and his biographer Ian Carr fits the hairy hand of Bly’s ‘Wild Man’ like the proverbial glove.