Chapter I
Intro
1) Motivation
2) Topic
3) Research question & Methodology
1) Motivation
Listening to “the Köln concert” (1975), born from an improvisation; was like getting into the thoughts and the emotions of Keith Jarrett, as if that performance was made to release all his feelings in that specific moment, like someone would do when writes all his thoughts on a diary, a way to let go everything we have inside.
Opening the concert with those first notes, exactly as one would begin to write in a diary; with a melancholy beauty to then gain confidence and throw yourself headlong and let off steam, writing down everything you have inside.
Those same notes that attack in minute 22 of the first episode of Dear Diary (Caro Diario), directed by Nanni Moretti.
That long sequence where shows him while he was driving a vespa through the streets of Ostia during the month of August, joins the notes and the sound of Jarrett.
Keith and his Cologne Concert seem to envelop the places visited by Nanni Moretti, leading us to the monument erected on the site where the murder of the Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini took place.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, an absolute genius of the Italian literature, as Keith Jarrett is for the jazz piano;
two characters quite similar to each other, anti-conformist and able to cause scandal, and both of them with a sort of bond with the solitude.
Like Pasolini said "You need to be very strong to love solitude", as if this statement could best represent Keith's life, illness and performance in the solo concert in Cologne.
My project is titled “My vision of your Diary's moment”, this is the title I want to give to my album of re-compositions of that concert by Keith Jarrett. The title suggests that I ventured too much, like a cheeky person who allowed himself to take one step too far by entering someone else's personal space. But hoping that Keith will forgive me, hearing that album of his gave me the desire to tell that beautiful story in my own way; emphasizing some of those piano passages and making them real pieces.
After my first year Master's concert I was suggested to think seriously about making this choice and not opting for a common transcription for big band. Not limiting myself only to observing someone else's work, but to making all this material a source of inspiration for my personal language. Effectively it would be too easy to just transcribe for another ensemble, I would not add anything of value.
I was reminded of a phrase said by the pianist and composer Nicola Piovani during one of his masterclasses at the Saint Louis Conservatory in Rome. We talked about and how to arrange a piano score for orchestra. Piovani said that "if the piece already works on the piano it is easy for it to sound good if arranged for orchestra." This memory has silenced any excuse to convince me to take the simpler path.
On the other hand, there is already one concert in Cologne and it is formidable as well. I don't want to simply spread a sheet over a statue whose shape was given by Keith; I want to create something of my own, something new, something that reminds of that story in Cologne.
2) Topic
During my musical studies I developed a great interest in the two main musical practice, during my bachelor in Jazz guitar I always been so fascinated by the abilities of the jazz musicians in improvising and after I switched to a classical composition course after my graduation, I’ve been really curious in all the techniques I could find in composing.
The concert in Koln is one of the most famous example that is at the turn of improvisation and a composition, the ability of Keith Jarrett in compose an entire concert on the spot got my curiosity and admiration from the first time I listened to that record.
Jarrett was just 29 years old and was already very famous, the one in Cologne was one of the stops on his first tour of Europe. He was tired, he hadn't slept for days, he had back pain and, moreover, when he landed in Zurich it was raining ... that day was made to blow everything up.
When he went up on the rehearsal stage that afternoon, instead of the piano he expected to find, he found a smaller one, out of tune and with broken pedals. "Damn it! ... I'm going home", I think he said, after all we could expect it from him. But the organizer was a the 19-year-old Vera Brandes, who certainly could not give up and see the dream of her life fade. Keith indeed finally got on that stage and played in an incredible way, perhaps one of the most beautiful concerts of his career.
This is a period in which orchestral jazz is experiencing one of the moments of greatest experimentation, and what fascinates me the most about this language is the possibility of being able to combine instruments that are belonging to the classical and the jazz world.
The use of the bass clarinet in unison with the double bass line, the muted trumpets with the clarinet, the flugelhorn in octave with the flute are just some examples on where the new way of writing for jazz orchestras are going; a way of composing largely used in the modern bigband, that may not even have the swing feeling of the big bands from Orleans, but which can equally be expressed effectively.
And more I was getting into the modern jazz orchestras sounds, more I was getting curious of how it would sound many of the piano solo concerts that Keith Jarrett made, and I’ve never been more convinced on how especially the concert in Koln would sounds good if played by a bigger ensemble.
I consumed Keith's album by listening so many times and I swear ... I always wished for someone to rearrange this masterpiece, I have searched everywhere, for real; on Spotify, Youtube.
Well… nobody did it and maybe nobody ever will… I'll try!
So this became my motivation, I wanted to satisfy my curiosity about how the Koln Concert would sound if played by an orchestra.
3) Research question and Methodology
What do you do when you want to arrange? where is the line between having done an original work or being too invasive? To what extent can you say that you have put your personal touch while respecting the identity of the creator?
These were the main doubts I had when starting this project. Surely because Keith Jarrett, as mentioned before, is a personality for whom I have enormous consideration, his charisma is so enveloping that, at times, he is capable of instilling great fear in me. I thought about it, I took some time, and in the end I turned all these doubts into a practical question, which led to my research question.
How to rework Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert for larger ensemble?
The arrangement, the composition, the orchestration are the different fields within the musical writing and one is absolutely no more noble than the other. An arranger can experiment as much as a composer trying to find a sought-after melody, and an orchestrator must have a great knowledge of orchestral instruments and the ability to imagine a lot, in order to find original combinations between instruments.
In my case, in this type of work, I'm going to use all these writing techniques; and the fact that it is a personal project, gives me the option of being able to choose how much one practice can prevail over the other. First, I had to answer the following question: Transcription or Re-composition? The first more respectful and bound, the second destructive and free. They are both very creative practices, in which the skills of someone who knows as many compositional techniques as possible is needed to create something original.
The transcription consists more in an orchestration and arrangement work, in which we try as much as possible to respect the character of the original piece and the personality of the author; you need to know the composer, his personality and his musical style. You need to know the story behind his work and grasp his point of view and what he wanted to express during its execution. In the transcription, all these abstract but intrinsic factors in the music must leak out from the arrangement. The melodies that have been written must come out, it is important to make them recognizable and the variations are quite limited.
In the re-composition you have the possibility to express your perception of the music composed by the author, you almost create a game between your own interpretation and what the original music wants to express. An interweaving story is told, in which sometimes I speak and sometimes the composer's voice comes out, other times instead a piece can be completely destroyed and then reconstructed in a totally different key; often with the intention of wanting to provoke or surprise the listener.
I had to take some time to figure out which direction to take, thinking about what my goal was for this project, that of creating a product of high artistic value. Therefore, before starting to work on writing the pieces, I reasoned about whether to expect the faithful performance of the recording of the concert in Koln, making Keith Jarrett recognizable, or to make the elaborate more personal by inserting my own re-compositions based on certain passages by the pianist, thus presenting my compositional style to the public.
The methodology I used to solve my research question was to receive a feedback from musicians, professors and composers, try to listen to concerts inherent with Keith Jarrett and trying to understand his philosophy.
I had the opportunity to have meetings with established composers/arrangers in the field, such as Trevor Grahl, Claudio De Rosa, Carlos Azevedo, Martin Fondse, to whom I asked what would be the most artistically valid way to face this work; I also created a survey to know the opinion of my fellow musicians, in order to know also as an instrumentalist what the review of the concert in Koln should be like.
To all those I asked for an opinion, I wanted to let them hear an excerpt of my composition based on the language and musical style that I would like to use during my elaborate on the concert in Koln, which I have already presented to the public during my concert final of the first year of the Master, on which I received further feedback from the former head of department Sussanne Abbuehl. Most of the interviewees preferred the idea of recomposing the pieces of the Koln Concert thus having the possibility of exposing my musical taste to the public.
A key role in making my decision was a concert in Amsterdam in October 2022 A classical pianist, that honestly I don’t feel like to expose his name, because I don’t have the quality of a reviewer, and I’m not here to write a review on his performance presented the concert in Koln on solo piano.
It was just a good opportunity to realize what it can mean to present a repertoire of that caliber to the public, thus playing the role of a listener. It must be said that I consider myself a good fan of Keith Jarrett and obsessed by the recording of the concert in Cologne, I listened to it uninterruptedly for years and also that day, on the journey from The Hague to Amsterdam, I played the albums on Spotify. I arrived at the venue full of expectations and curious to hear live songs that I've always listened to with headphones; and very often, as happens when one has too many expectations, one is always a little disappointed.
I was disappointed that the repertoire turned out to be a simple performance of the concert transcription; I was able to peek at the score that the pianist was reading after his concert, and it was the transcription made by Yukiko Kishinami and Kunihiko Yamashita, the same one I'm working on. Its execution was precisely that of a classical pianist reading the score of a composition born to be an improvisation. He even stamped his foot as written on the score, but he didn't make the vocal ? lines Keith makes in his recording. I wonder if he didn't because they aren't marked on the score or maybe is not that elegant for a classical player.
I didn't like the sound of the concert hall, it was a church… too much reverb; and having gotten used to the sound of the recording, I felt the sound of the concert in Amsterdam too heavy; I could sense the lack of brilliance of the Bösendorfer that Keith played within the Köln opera house. I never expected that even the venue would affect the performance of the concert.
But what surprised me even more was the fact that the audience also influenced my consideration of the concert. In Cologne, immediately after the first five opening notes of the concert, a light laugh is heard from the audience; it may seem exaggerated, but this element seems to me very characteristic of this recording; fits well in context, adds a nice sense of levity to the “Dsus chord” Keith plays at the beginning of the improvisation. Even the applause that is heard at the end of the last track gives a romantic sense to the conclusion of the concert. The Cologne opera house can accommodate up to 1300 people, and this slightly reverberated applause that disappears in fade-out suggests that to have concluded was not simply a live performance, but an undertaking at the limit of the imaginable.
On the way back I put the concert in Koln back on my headphones, wanting to take back the pleasure I have in listening to this masterpiece. I had time to think about what it can mean for a listener, who cares about an artist, to hear his music replayed; especially in Jazz, where the music that is composed and improvised can have such a strong and personal character that it can involve the listener in an overwhelming way.
Unfortunately, when you come across this type of work, whether you like it or not, you compare yourself with whoever created the original. It often happens in jazz that if you present a repertoire of standards of some giant, people compare you to him, your way of improvising, your phrasing, your timbre, your technique; they are all elements that must be at the level of who you want to pay homage to, and if the public is not satisfied with them, it is easy to cover yourself with criticism.
This is why I came to the conclusion that basing the rewriting of the concert in Cologne on my personal language and on my interpretation of the pieces is the right way to go; the re-composition is the writing key I used to pay my homage to Keith Jarrett.
Now that I have clarified this doubt of mine, , I was able to begin to work on the form of the re-compositions, which will consist of sections composed by me; based on some elements of the concert, mainly taken from the sections where Jarrett improvised; alternating with sections in which I will take highly recognizable themes and rearrange them in keeping with the fidelity of his origin