How Keith Jarrett Performed on a Damaged Piano & Turned a Probably Disastrous Live performance Into the Finest-Promoting Piano Album of All Time (1975)

Close to­ly fifty years in the past, the cel­e­brat­ed younger pianist Kei­th Jar­rett arrived within the West Ger­man metropolis of Köln (wager­ter identified in Eng­lish as Cologne). Hav­ing simply come off a 500-mile-long street journey from Switzer­land, the place he’d performed a con­cert the pre­vi­ous day, he was left with naked­ly any time to recov­er earlier than going onstage on the Köln Opera Home that evening — at 11:30 that evening, to be pre­cise, the one time that august cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion would give a jazz musi­cian. As a result of the restau­rant the place he try­ed to have din­ner earlier than­hand combined up his order, he might naked­ly eat a factor earlier than present­time. And his again was act­ing up.

But all of these dif­fi­cul­ties had been as noth­ing towards the mis­er­ready instru­ment await­ing Jar­rett on the opera home. He’d request­ed a Bösendor­fer 290 Impe­r­i­al grand piano, however a collection of errors led to the employees set­ting up a dilap­i­dat­ed, frail-sound­ing child grand of the identical make.

Unable to professional­treatment a change­ment, the con­cert’s teenage orga­niz­er Vera Bran­des referred to as in a tuner to do his greatest to deliver the piano as much as playa­bil­i­ty and man­aged to per­suade Jar­rett to go on with the present. All of the seats had been bought, in spite of everything, and the document­ing engi­neers had their gear able to roll; within the worst case sce­nario, he’d find yourself with anoth­er tape for the archives.

Within the occasion, the con­cert was extra of a best-case sce­nario. “What Kei­th Jar­rett did so bril­liant­ly was to take this bro­ken piano and use it to play music that solely that piano might have performed,” says Youtu­ber David Hart­ley in the video above. “He did­n’t cover away from the faults of the piano; as a substitute, he embraced them and put them within the music. That is the very essence of impro­vi­sa­tion.” A clas­si­cal musi­cian with an outlined set of items might nev­er have labored in any respect beneath these con­di­tions, however Jar­rett finish­ed up placing on fairly a suc­cess­ful present — and, with the document­ing, placing out an enormous­ly suc­cess­ful album.

After it got here out in Novem­ber that very same yr, The Köln Con­cert went on to change into each the best-sell­ing solo jazz album and the best-sell­ing piano album. For many years, it was eas­i­ly discovered even within the document col­lec­tions of those that owned no oth­er releas­es from ECM, the Ger­man jazz and avant-garde label with which Jar­rett has lengthy been asso­ci­at­ed, and heard on the sound­tracks of movies by auteurs like Nico­las Roeg and Nan­ni Moret­ti. Nonetheless as we speak, it stands in sup­port of any num­ber of proverbs about neces­si­ty being the moth­er of inven­tion, play­ing the hand you’re dealt, and never wait­ing for ide­al con­di­tions. If we lis­ten to it sufficient, we could even discover our­selves wait­ing for ter­ri­ble ones.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Brains of Jazz and Clas­si­cal Musi­cians Work Dif­fer­ent­ly, New Research Shows

The Piano Played with 16 Increas­ing Lev­els of Com­plex­i­ty: From Easy to Very Com­plex

Neu­ro­science & Jazz Impro­vi­sa­tion: How Impro­vi­sa­tion Shapes Cre­ativ­i­ty and What Hap­pens Inside Our Brain

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Piano Jazz Album by Come­di­an H. Jon Ben­jamin — Who Can’t Play Piano

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often called Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.