When Keith Jarrett turned up at the Opera House in Cologne at the end of January 1975 to perform a concert of solo piano improvisations on the promise of a Bösendorfer grand piano, he despaired at the actual instrument he’d been given to play on—a baby grand that would clearly require multiple attempts to stabilise its tuning, with pedals that didn’t even move up and down properly. He had arrived already burned out, suffering from a chronic back condition that kept him awake at night, to play a concert scheduled to start only at 11.30pm, once the stage had been reset following that evening’s opera performance.
He had decided, all things considered, that it was probably best to cancel, but reconciled himself to the slog ahead, largely because his record company, ECM, had gone to the expense of setting up its recording equipment. Later, he would recall playing in a pain-induced trance, but the album that resulted from that evening, The Köln Concert, became his most successful record by far, achieving what few jazz records manage—breaking through to mainstream consciousness.
Five decades on, it continues to cast a long shadow, defining not only the very sound of Jarrett but a whole approach to meditative, rippling piano that begat an industry of copycat ambient piano records, was used by the director Nicolas Roeg in his film Bad Timing (1980), and meant that the pianist was guaranteed a full house wherever, and whatever, he played. Jarrett himself, now 81, has been unable to perform in public since suffering a pair of debilitating strokes in 2018. Since his illness, ECM has plundered its archives to keep up a steady flow of fresh new releases but, whatever else appears, the Jarrett story can’t help but wind back to that evening in 1975.
The centrepiece of a recent minifestival at the Barbican, A Celebration of Keith Jarrett, was a Köln Concert evening: the classical pianist Thomas Enhco performing a note-for-note transcription, then jazz pianist Maki Namekawa building improvisations of her own around Jarrett’s material. Meanwhile, the album is the subject of no less than two recent movies: the drama Köln 75, directed by Ido Fluk, starring John Magaro as Jarrett, landed in May, while a documentary, Köln Tracks, was part of this year’s Sheffield Doc Fest.
Jarrett has declined involvement in either film, an attitude of indifference that would have likely prevailed even if he were in better health. In 1991, he bowed to the inevitable and allowed Schott Music to publish The Köln Concert: Original Transcription. He reasoned that an authorised transcription was preferrable to allowing unsanctioned versions to circulate, but wrote a preface that simultaneously poured cold water over the whole idea. His rhythmic and metronomic idiosyncrasies were, he said, impossible to transcribe, while the internal resonance of pianos—strings vibrating long after the pianist has moved onto other notes—meant that the transcription was merely “a picture” of an improvised concert that “should go as quickly as it comes”. Pianists wanting to perform the transcription should imbibe the original recording as a “final-word reference”—and, you can sense Jarrett itching to add, why even bother when you simply can listen to the album?
As biographer of Dave Brubeck, another white jazz pianist who maintained strong interests in classical tradition, I often encounter the expectation that I must be a Jarrett superfan too. Although he’s proved impossible to ignore, in fact I’ve found his oeuvre often hard to love. A recent lucky strike in a charity shop—a haul of Jarrett live, including The Köln Concert, the 10-CD followup, Sun Bear Concerts, and a box set of live trio recordings made at the Blue Note Club in New York in 1994—led me to reconsider the Jarrett enigma, although I can only concur with his own assessment that The Köln Concert should have gone as quickly as it came—or, at the very least, is an album deserving of a more proportionate assessment.
The ‘Köln Concert’ should have gone as quickly as it came
The side of Jarrett I can admire is the intrepid jazz improviser who, working with other musicians, sends the constituent parts of jazz standards and compositions scattering to the margins. The trio Jarrett kept with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette from 1983 until 2014 best exemplified this approach. The trio deconstructed standards such as “All The Things You Are”, “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “My Funny Valentine” brick by brick, although, I had assumed, with the law of diminishing returns. Then the opening track of the Blue Note Club set—as it happens, Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way”—blew that assumption apart. I heard Jarrett view Brubeck’s harmonic obstacle course from multiple perspectives at once, the architecture of his epic solo becoming more ornate as it went. As a final coup de théâtre, a particularly juicy harmonic segment was snatched from the tune and looped tail-to-tail, jam into a strutting groove that travels direct to your soul. The audience go crazy, and Jarrett sounds like he’s having the time of his life.
You don’t need to look far for comparable exuberance. Let’s not forget those records he made while still a Miles Davis sideman, playing electric keyboard and organ, filling records like Live-Evil and At Fillmore with abstracted funk steps that dissipated towards white-noise sound clouds. Or Jarrett’s own Expectations from 1972, the one album he made for Miles’s label, Columbia, a display of triumphantly unhinged and unruly rootsy gospel-saturated soul that loosens itself towards psychedelic delirium. Or, indeed, the two groups—a quartet with saxophonist Dewey Redman, and his so-called “Scandinavian quartet” featuring Jan Garbarek—which were his focus until the solo piano concerts gathered pace. “The Wind-Up”, an impish composition penned for the Scandinavian quartet, propelled musicians towards improvisation via a melodic construct that continually turned itself upside down—and downside up—tumbling through all sorts of oblique angles, the cleancut resolution implicit in its melody somehow never materialising.
The solo albums play a different game altogether. Without any interlocutors to trade ideas against, Jarrett turns in on himself and, frankly, I’m not convinced that was a good place to be. His most revelatory solo album is his first live one, Bremen/Lausanne, from 1973, which, compared to what came later, had grit in its claw. The Köln Concert and Sun Bear Concerts from 1978, recorded live in Japan, work increasingly to a formula. Happy-go-lucky harmonies are undermined by darker atonalities, then the music invariably sidesteps into a sprightly dance. Jarrett has worked out how to play solo.
Of course, he had technique to burn, but a second career as a classical pianist, recording Bach, Mozart and Shostakovich, resulted again in micromanaged performances of unrelenting stiffness—like the music could never find its flow, a wretched place for the composer of “The Wind-Up” to end up.
In contrast, the authenticity of The Köln Concert had been entirely a matter of time and circumstance. That highly compromised baby grand piano obliged Jarrett to ignore its tinny upper range and instead generate swells of bass, while restricting his melodic improvisation to mid-keyboard. He suffered, literally, to create that music, and playing a transcription on a top-range Bösendorfer misses the point entirely. Jazz is not about formulas or recreating landmark moments of its history. It finds its expression within improvisation, living with the risk of each moment. Once that moment is gone, no amount of reverence can bring it back.
