Vera Brandes was all of 17 when she set out to present the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, 29, at the opera house in her native Cologne (or Köln), Germany. For a decade, Jarrett had been making his name backing up headliners like Art Blakely, Charles Lloyd, and Miles Davis. On tour in Europe in 1975, he was flying solo.
Never mind that Brandes was defying her parents, that the Cologne opera house had never hosted a jazz concert before, or that the only available time slot was close to midnight. Brandes forged ahead and sold out the hall at four Deutsche Mark a pop. Then, at the last minute, everything started to go wrong. Let the likeable British guitarist and YouTuber David Hartley tell you about it on his recent eight-minute video, “How a total disaster became the world’s best-selling piano album.”
That’s The Köln Concert he’s talking about, live playback originally released as two classic 12-inch long-playing vinyl platters on the ECM Records label. Basking in the music you have to wonder: what could possibly have gone so wrong?
More to the point, what didn’t? For starters, the Cologne date fell the night after a gig in the Swiss city of Lausanne, 500 miles away, without the usual day off in between. Yet rather than fly, Jarrett cashed in the plane ticket Brandes had provided and hopped a ride with ECM’s trailblazing producer Manfred Eicher. When the men finally arrived, Jarrett discovered that the piano onstage was not the promised Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand, but a battered, out-of-tune baby Bösendorfer with keys that stuck, rolled in from some rehearsal studio elsewhere in the building. Too late to bring in another! Jarrett’s dinner at the nearby Italian bistro fell through, too.
The live recording went on to become not only the best-selling solo album in jazz history but also the best-selling piano album of all time.
Time to walk, thought the hungry artist. But the house was sold out, refunds were off the table, and the recording engineers were ready to go. And so, Jarrett sat down for a graceful, kaleidoscopic hour of luminous improvisation—so luminous that other pianists later insisted that Jarrett transcribe it for them to play, too, if not as well. Captured almost on a whim, the live recording went on to become not only the best-selling solo album in jazz history but also the best-selling piano album of all time.
“This isn’t my story,” Hartley writes in a recent email, “only one that I have retold from other sources.” He does so expertly, partly in his own words, partly in cannily chosen archival film clips of the principal players. But it’s the questions Hartley raises that make the video so special. “I don’t think listeners are buying the album to hear a broken piano,” he remarks midway. From that point on, he’s reflecting on the music, the nature of improvisation, the cultural climate of the moment, and the serendipity of the imperfect.
In Hartley’s hands, the implications of The Köln Concert thus fascinate as much or more than the bare facts. And if you’re thinking there’s feature potential here, so does the filmmaker Ido Fluk, whose cinematic reenactment The Girl from Köln (alternately listed as Köln 75) is currently in post-production.
“How a total disaster became the world’s best-selling piano album,” a video by David Hartley, is posted on YouTube
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
