The Köln Concert

by Keith Jarrett

Can you think of any jazz album that has not one but two films dedicated to it? I can’t either. Unless it’s The Köln Concert, that is.

Köln 75 is a German drama focused on Vera Brandes, a (then 18-year-old) German producer who was responsible for the concert taking place at all. The film was actually shown in mainstream Spanish theatres, sometime in July, but it passed me by. Damn.

And Köln Tracks, aka Lost in Köln, is a French documentary tracking (or losing?) that notorious Bösendorfer piano played and hated by Mr Jarrett on 24 January 1975. It is supposed to be released about now.

So these are tributes that I didn’t see. What about The Köln Concert itself? I discovered it about 30 years ago, thanks to The Penguin Guide to Jazz which I used to borrow from the Leeds Central Library on a regular basis. The Guide gave the album four stars of four and said ^*:

This is perhaps Jarrett’s best and certainly his most popular record. ECM has been dining out or, to be fairer, recording others on the proceeds for over a decade^†. Made in conditions of exceptional difficulty — not least an audibly unsatisfactory piano — Jarrett not for the first time makes a vurtue of adversity, carving out huge slabs of music with a rare intensity. His insturment does sound off-puttingly bad-tempered, but his concentration on the middle register throughout the performance has been a characteristic of his work throughout his carreer.

Armed with this knowledge, I embarked on a search — and found the CD in the very same library. The concert didn’t disappoint. And the piano didn’t sound half that bad. Some years later, I bought my own copy directly from ECM, further contributing to the album’s bestselling status.

It so happened that on the 50^th anniversary of the concert, Friday 24 January, I was listening to the Sólo Jazz programme of Spanish Radio Clásica. Curiously, the authors of this golden jubilee programme chose to play the concert in the following order: Part II c; Part I; Part II b. The result? I heard the old concert with new ears, and it was as beautiful.

I can understand why Jarrett himself is not a fan: a true artist rightfully refuses to be defined by a half-century-old LP as if he didn’t record anything decent since. But I am not Keith Jarrett. I love this “huge slab of music”. If the author wants to disown it, let him do it. I’d put it on the next Voyager Golden Record as an example of what an (anonymous) human musician can do.

*	Cook, R. and Morton, B. The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, LP and Cassette, 2nd Ed. Penguin Books, London, 1994, p. 682.
†	In later editions, “for over a decade” was changed to “for two decades”; see e.g. The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, 8th Ed. Penguin Books, London, 2006, p. 697.