Chapter V
The Concert in Koln
Story and background of the concert in Koln
We have already anticipated that Jarrett's collaboration with ECM produced hours and hours of piano solos without accompaniment recorded live, which found absolute perfection in the Koln Concert, even though the project appeared at that time destined for a total commercial flop.
Thus Jarrett recalls that bizarre story behind his most popular album, a story that took place in the middle of his solo tour when he was drove by his producer Manfred Eicher, founder of the ECM at the end of the 1960.
They were in Lausanne the night before and Jarrett says he didn't sleep at all; they had to wake up very early in the morning of the concert, in order to arrive in time with the car from Lausenne to Koln. When they arrived they were completely exhausted.
They were waiting in the lobby for the organizer of the concert, Vera Brandes. When she arrived, she told them that the tickets were sold out and took them to the theater, where they found everything except the piano Jarrett requested. There was no Steinways, but there were only two Bosendorfers available in town, one of which was very good.
The transport company brought in the wrong Bosendorfer, which Keith compared to a poor imitation of an harpsichord. They asked to bring the piano back and bring the good one, but the van had already been sent back. They asked for another van, but couldn't find one big enough to carry the good piano.
So Jarrett went back to the hotel to try to rest, but he couldn't and he felt even worse. Then he and Eicher went to eat; according to Jarrett, they went to a bad Italian restaurant, where the food arrived fifteen minutes before it was supposed to be at the theater.
Keith remembers the moment he was about to step on stage, and feel like he was almost going to fall asleep. Then the moment he entered the hall to start playing he was relieved that the day was over there, he said to himself:
“I am now going out here with this piano and the hell with everything else!”[1]
The Koln Concert shows how delicate Keith Jarrett's artistic sensibility is, deprived of the tonal possibilities that a good piano can have, he had to adapt to an instrument that sounded more like a saloon piano.
It was passable in the low and mid register, but the high register sounded too brilliant. For this reason Jarrett tended to confine himself to the central area of the piano, a good reason to have a more rhythmic and repetitive approach, because in the medium/bass register the rhythmic elements can be well exploited.
The sonority is somehow abandoned in favor of the rhythm, in a nutshell, he plays the entire concert with the limits of his instrument, and with this limit he has been able to reach his state of grace, he has been able to draw great inspiration.
This great simplicity, this folk and rudimentary sonority, made the concert very clear and accessible to the public. It is as if these limitations have given Jarrett the possibility to create hypnotic music that has a strong identity.
Manfred and Keith listened to the concert tape while in the car on tour and eventually decided to release it, because musically it could be considered as one piece. Subsequently Eicher and his sound engineer, Martine Wieland, who also recorded the concert, worked for two or three days in the studio to make the sound quality slightly better, and it was eventually released later the same year.
Ian Carr in an interview with Keith Jarrett, told in his book Keith Jarrett, The man and his music, asked why the album of The Koln Concert has become so popular, Jarrett replied:
“I think that’s because there is a logic people associate with reality that reality doesn’t actually have all the time, but which did exist on the occasion of that particular concert- it’s sounds free, but it also sounds like it’s moving from one thought to another without any separation, without any jump… The struggle and stress had taken place immediately before the Koln Concert which thus became a refuge from that struggle and stress- an escape.”[2]