If I could choose one historic cultural event to attend with the assistance of a time machine, then the late evening of 25th January 1975 at the opera house in Cologne would definitely be on my shortlist.
That story of that night has taken on almost mythological proportions in the decades since, but is worth retelling here.
The American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, then 29, had been booked to appear by an 18 year old jazz-mad German student called Vera Brandes. The opera house had never staged jazz before and the management would only let Brandes have the venue once the evening opera crowd had departed. Despite not starting until 11:30pm, the 1,400 seater hall was sold out.
But the concert nearly didn’t happen: staff at the opera house mistook a battered rehearsal piano made by the same company, for the Bösendorfer 290 Imperial that Jarrett had requested, and there was no time for Brandes to get hold of a decent piano. Technicians worked tirelessly to tune the instrument and make it sound worthy of the man who was about to play it.
The young pianist had already made a conisderable name for himself in the jazz world. He was hired at 19 by Art Blakey to play with Jazz Messengers, before joining Charles Lloyd’s quartet, then being poached in 1968 by Miles Davis, where he shared keyboard duties with Chick Corea, the two of them sometimes appearing together, including at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival (talking of time machines!) A couple of years later he was approached by Manfred Eicher, a young German record producer, for whose ECM record label he would go on to record dozens of albums.
By the time he arrived in Cologne that evening, tired and hungry after a long drive from Zurich, Jarrett’s improvised jazz piano playing was already on the way to legendary status. And remarkably given the circumstances, it was that night in Cologne that would cement his reputation.
Confronted by the substandard instrument, Jarrett was ready to walk, but depending on which account you believe (I prefer the latter), he took pity on / was cajoled into playing by the young promoter, and went ahead with the concert. According to Brandes, it was the limitations of the instrument that forced Jarrett to play the way he did. Had the correct piano been delivered and the concert proceeded without problems, who knows if the recording would have become the best selling solo piano album of all time, or the best selling solo jazz recording in history, passing 4 million sales?
Perhaps there is a lesson in this. As Tim Harford wrote in his 2016 book Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform our Lives:
‘Jarrett didn’t produce a good concert in trying times. He produced the performance of a lifetime, but the shortcomings of the piano actually helped him. The substandard instrument forced Jarrett away from the tinny high notes and into the middle register. His left hand produced rumbling, repetitive bass riffs as a way of covering up the piano’s lack of resonance. Both of these elements gave the performance an almost trancelike quality. That might have faded into wallpaper music, but Jarrett couldn’t drop anchor in that comfortable musical harbor, because the piano simply wasn’t loud enough.’
Keith Jarrett suffered two strokes in 2018 and is no longer able to perform, not that he would have have re-visited the Köln Concert. But in order to preserve the integrity of the original performance he gave permission to his friend, the Japanese pianist, Maki Namekawa, a prodigous talent in her own right, to perform it.
And so, nearly five decades later, I set off for Peckham last weekend for a concert I thought I’d never hear. The venue, Bold Tendencies, a top the enormous disused car park in Peckham that is also home to Frank’s Cafe, was perfect. The low concrete ceiling made for a surpsingly good acoustic, although the exquisitely-toned Steinway concert grand did require some amplification to counter the buzz drifting up from Rye Lane on a sunny Saturday evening, and the sound of trains pulling in and out of Peckham Rye station.
The Steinway made for a quite different sound from the recording, inevitably, but Namekawa’s performance was exquisite. As Fiona Maddocks wrote in her review for The Observer:
Her smiling grace and exceptional musical authority were spellbinding. And her tiny chuckles and yelps, as she played, recreated the freewheeling spirit of Jarrett himself.
The recording comprises four peices, the first, timed at 26 minutes, is one of the loveliest pieces of piano music I know. The second half divides into three shorter pieces, although the third of these was played as an encore that night in Cologne and is, in fact, a re-working of an earlier Jarrett piece Memories of Tomorrow, first recorded in 1969. This, perhaps, explains the lack of compositional integrity of the second half compared with the first, but remember we’re talking improvisation here, and Jarrett has stated that, with the exception of the encore, it was all improvised: when he sat down, he had no idea what he was going to play.
There remains the question of whether an improvised piece of music can survive transcription and playing as if it was a conventional piece of concert music, composed for the purpose of public perfomance, rather than emerging spontaneously from the mind of a musical genius.
But if you were to ask that question of the six hundred or so people present last Saturday evening on the 9th floor a car park in Peckham, their answer would be a resounding: yes. The standing ovation was entirely deserved by the sublime playing of Maki Namekawa, who added her own encore: a Jarrett arrangement of My Wild Irish Rose, to end the evening. But I suspect much of the applause was for the enduring legacy of one of the great pianists of the 20th century.
Postscript: The remarkable story of Vera Brandes and the Köln Concert is the subject of a soon to be released film, entitled The Girl from Köln. If it’s a fraction as good as the concert recording, it’ll be worth a watch.