Life tends to flow in ruptures, but people love it when it flows. Almost 50 years ago, jazz pianist Keith Jarrett surrendered to the flow of tones for 66 minutes and 5 seconds at the Cologne Opera, more unrestrained and free than before and never again since.
“The Cologne Concert” is one of the most successful jazz albums ever, with around four million copies sold to date. Jarrett himself only commented on the concert once, he doesn’t consider it one of his finest moments. He once said that he lacked the inner struggle and inner turmoil. He doesn’t like to talk about this legendary evening.
Keith Jarret was booked on call
Very different Vera Brandes. She organized the concert on January 24, 1975. “If you were involved in something so big, you have to talk about it,” says Brandes, who now heads a research institute for music medicine in Salzburg. At that time she was only 18 years old. The later label founder and producer had already organized her first concert two years earlier: the girl from an educated family got in touch with the jazz journalist Manfred Miller through a friend of her grandmother’s. He took her to the Berlin Jazz Days, she met Manfred Eicher, head of the exquisite ECM label, lost herself in Ralph Towner’s music and wanted to bring him to Cologne.
She even managed to get WDR to make a recording. “I was a student!” exclaims Vera Brandes, amazed at her own story. Only: who should advance the 1000 euros for the hall? The grandmother was softened and gave Vera Brandes’ mother along the way: “If it’s a success, you have a little genius at home. If she doesn’t, she’ll never do it again.”
The Towner concert was a success and two years later she booked Keith Jarrett. On demand. Because he still had free slots on tour. In order to get the Cologne Opera, he even made an exception and agreed to travel without a day off in between.
The wing caused problems
But a broken Keith Jarrett wasn’t the biggest problem. Unfortunately, the administrative director of the Cologne Opera, who had promised the young organizer a large grand piano, a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial, had the day off. “The grand piano was parked in a corridor between the theater and the opera because that was the only room with a constant temperature and humidity,” says Brandes today. Nobody knew that then. The stage technicians searched the entire opera and found “this impossible Stutz part somewhere in the last but one singing room for the opera singers. It said ‘Bösendorfer’ on it – and that was all.” Some keys didn’t work and the pedals didn’t work either. “Well, Keith can’t play a concert on this instrument tonight,” says Manfred Eicher, “and you either get a decent piano or we can cancel the concert.”
“All the credit that this concert took place at all goes to the tuner,” says Vera Brandes, who was unable to find a replacement grand piano at the time. “By the evening he had gotten the piano so far that Jarrett could play on it – new strings put on, repaired the pedals…” The grand piano was later scrapped, says Brandes. “If someone on their deathbed asks me, ‘What was the biggest mistake of your life?’ I answer, ‘Not buying that thing right away!'”
“It’s okay. I’ll play. But never forget: Just for you”
The fact that Keith Jarrett actually got on stage is not only thanks to the tuner, but also to the impulsiveness and naivety of an 18-year-old. From the window of the opera administration Brandes had seen the artist get into her brother’s car. He wanted to go to the hotel, probably not to come back. “I slammed down, opened the passenger door and said a sentence out of snippets of English I’d picked up somewhere: ‘Keith, if you don’t play tonight, I’m gonna be truly fucked, and I know you’re gonna be truly fucked, too.'”
Jarrett, by then already a highly regarded star who had had success with his own ensembles and solo albums after his time with Miles Davis, struggled for composure. “He replied with incredible pathos: ‘It’s okay. I’ll play. But never forget: Just for you.’ Then I kissed him or something like that.”
“The Köln Concert” has been loved and hated ever since. The Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti erected a memorial to him in his 1993 autobiographical film “Dear Diary…”. For minutes, his cinematic alter ego cruises around Rome on a Vespa to Jarrett’s solo piano playing, admires beautiful houses in the neighborhoods and mourns at the spot where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered. You can’t imagine a better soundtrack, one that seamlessly combines fascination and joy with radiant euphoria, melancholy and deep sadness. The German satirist Wiglaf Droste did not share Moretti’s fascination and instead held “The Köln Concert” responsible for the worst excesses of 70s inwardness. “Young people grew old / When Keith Jarrett strummed / On the flokati suffered very quietly / Who previously pimped happily,” he wrote. Quite a few agreed with him – some, however, with glazed eyes.
“For me, the concert is a prayer,” says Vera Brandes. “It’s an incredible statement that has a lot to do with reconciliation, including with yourself. That’s the magic. Perhaps this whole constellation relieved him of a certain pressure to perform. So he was like, This shitty thing…I’m really just playing this for her sake.”
More highlights
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