The Koln Concert

The story goes that's it's the music of a hard travel day on a bad piano. Is that really all there is to it?

Go to this link to see a poster advertising the actual concert.

For Valentine’s Day, I go with Keith Jarrett’s The Koln Concert (ECM, 1975). Maybe it’s an odd choice— a funny Valentine— but from that chiming opening phrase that kicks off Side 1, to the rollicking gospel of Side 2, to Side 3’s nod to minimalism before touching down with Jarrett’s “Memories of Tomorrow”¹ on Side 4 are you really able to withstand the music’s many charms?

If so, I admire your fortitude, for a few minutes into The Koln Concert, all my defenses fade, and I’m with Keith and the millions of listeners who have made the album what it is for the past 50 years. The many AI-esque knockoffs have diminished the music’s novelty, but not its power.

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The Koln Concert was improvised, but it doesn’t really sound like most jazz— there’s some bluesy moments, but no actual blues and only the dimmest echoes of bebop.² Melodically and harmonically, Jarrett’s concert owes more to singer-songwriters—specifically Joni Mitchell— and classical composers than to Bud Powell, Horace Silver, or Duke Ellington.

But there is one thing about The Koln Concert that really makes it jazz: Jarrett’s feel. Listen to the beat in Jarrett’s left hand, so bubbly and bouncy, and notice those unencumbered flights in his right hand— that’s where the real magic is. Dig that rhythm. And what could bring people together on Valentine’s Day more than a great beat?

Jarrett, Manfred Eicher (founder and primary producer of ECM, Jarrett’s long-time label), and Jarrett biographer Ian Carr have long put forward a “story of the Koln Concert” which starts with Keith’s chronic back pain throughout his three-week January ‘75³ solo tour; a long drive on the day of the concert from Zurich, CH to Cologne (Koln), DE, Jarrett and Eicher crammed in Eicher’s car; a rushed pre-concert dinner; and perhaps most well-known, the ‘bad’ piano, delivered in error to the horror of the concert’s promoter, Vera Brandes, then only 18 years old.

The beautiful sounds of The Koln Concert emerged, so the story goes, from a combination of Jarrett’s severe back pain and a faulty instrument. Boiled down, Jarrett’s explanation for The Koln Concert is that it was the only stuff he could manage to play on a difficult piano with compromised health.

I don’t doubt any of the reported facts, but I feel like we’re missing something.

For one thing, in January 1975, Jarrett was a seasoned 29 year-old road dog who had been on tour continuously since 1965, when he joined Art Blakey. As all musicians know, disrupted travel, substandard equipment, weird food, and physical discomfort are simply what touring is, now and forever. I don’t doubt that he was in pain, nor do I mean to minimize it, but it’s inconceivable that Keith Jarrett, a young virtuoso, veteran of Blakey, Charles Lloyd, and Miles Davis, who had already completed several of his own tours, would find the situation he faced in Koln that night anything less than typical. He’d been giving concerts under these conditions for years.

But more to the point: you don’t create, out of more-or-less thin air, 65 minutes of music that speak to millions of listeners over a vast expanse of time and space because of back pain, a long car ride, wrong instrument, and a lousy dinner. That’s not how it’s done. If that’s all it took, we’d be seeking out crap gear and worse restaurants when we toured.

Keith Jarrett, beloved of the gods, certainly knows this. Was the piano a factor? Sure. Hard travel, lousy food, back pain? Of course. But that’s not what The Koln Concert is.

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So what is it then?

A rumor, from a reliable source, alleges the presence of a certain woman at The Koln Concert, one whom the pianist was perhaps trying to reach. I have no idea how true this is, but it certainly ties together The Koln Concert’s mix of heady longing and something earthier, a sensuality we can all hear.

The Koln Concert is a reaching out, a brave, almost embarrassingly earnest public performance of human connection. At its core, it’s a love song, composed on the spot, performed to win the beloved’s heart, an expression of the composer/performer’s deep longing and pure spirit. This makes The Koln Concert a perfect demonstration of an eternal truth: we’ll do anything for love. Just right for Valentine’s Day.

If it’s not that, then what is it? Why else or how else could it have touched everyone the way it has? What could be more universal than doing something extraordinary to win someone’s affection? This story of “the only stuff that worked on a crappy piano in the middle of a tough tour” (I’m paraphrasing) is like Pablo Neruda saying that his love poems were only written because, on his typewriter, the letters “A-M-O-R” were the only ones working well. In other words, it’s at best, a half-truth.

Apparently, Keith and Manfred weren’t initially considering the concert for release. Hard to imagine, but ok. Easier to understand is their shock when the record became a hit. And The Koln Concert was an old-school blockbuster smash, selling millions of copies, reaching people who would never otherwise listen to an improvised solo piano album. It touched hearts and ignited imaginations as an absolute zeitgeist recording, authentically popular fifty years later.

I mean, here, click this link. Listen to that. Do we really think a human being would make music like this mostly because of an unsatisfying bass register?

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A tough tour, a bad piano, and an unexpected hit. That’s The Koln Concert of podcasts and the internet, but not, I think, The Koln Concert we’ve been loving for 50 years. That one, the one we actually hear, is aware of the ordinary sub-optimal conditions of life— and might even be a response to a specific somebody, the most mundane and transcendent of realities— but subsumes them, and then transmutes them into beautiful music. The power of music is in its ability to project the deepest aspirations of the musician, creating the unbreakable bond between musician and listener. All music does this, and The Koln Concert does this at peak intensity.

So was there someone? Was the performer/composer in love? Or was it really just back pain and a bad piano? Of course we’ll never know, and of course it’s probably both. Music, like all human behavior, is ultimately inexplicable. We are dastardly complex creatures motivated by deep, mostly invisible desires which we don’t fully understand. But we’re also sweet-natured and simple beings who, given halfway decent conditions, merely want to feel connected to something beautiful that’s bigger than ourselves. Listen to The Koln Concert; that’s what it is. And that’s what music is. We play to express love and to be loved, no matter what.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Go connect with someone or something, with respect and gratitude…

1. On the album it’s simply called “Part II C”, but most musicians know it as “Memories of Tomorrow”. It was a chart in the original Berklee College of Music Real Book.

2. Sadly, I note that this must be partly why the album is so popular.

3. See keithjarrett.org, which lists Jarrett solo concerts from January 17 to February 5th.