January 24, 1975, Keith Jarrett Gave a solo piano performance in Opera House in Cologne, Germany. The concert lasted a little over an hour, it was completely improvised, and it was recorded and turned into a double album, “Cologne concert“Released later that year. It became the best -selling solo album in Jazz History, as well as the best -selling piano album. And when you listen to it you can hear why.
The 1970s were a piano-man age. Imagine Billy Joel and Elton John and also Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock and Jan Hammer and Jarrett. There is Keith Jarrett -Album that has more pyrotechnic glare than the “Cologne concert” (like “Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne,” from 1973, where he enters a counterpunalism that makes him sound like JS Bach with a gospel – – track). But the “Cologne concert”, for all its happy riots, radiates a vibe that is very much of its soft era. That is exultant but soothing. Sometimes it evokes the pastoral moods that would make the new age pianist George Winston so popular, and in others it is the aural equivalent of an impressionistic painting of the most haunting sunset you ever saw. As a pianist, Jarrett was as the soul’s brother of Rachmaninoff crossed with a sentimental free-jazz-rhapsodist. In the “Cologne concert” he improvised an avid cacophony that people have been listening to for 50 years as a kind of meditation. It is music to succeed.
“Cologne 75“Ido Flu’s narrow and odd and lightly distracting music biopics, the story tells of that concert. It’s about how Jarrett’s secured performance almost didn’t happen, and how even when it did, it was a case to make lemonade from lemons, because various factors suggested that it would be a disaster. But even though Jarrett is a character in “Cologne 75” (he has played, with convincing intensity, by John Magaro), the film is really about everything that led to the concert. The central character, Vera Brandes (Mala Emde), is the 18-year-old Spitfire who organized the concert, promoted it and-in a crucial moment-chased Jarrett to go through it after he decided to back out.
You won’t hear a drop of Keith Jarrett’s music in “Cologne 75.” Early, when a narrator compares the sound of Jarrett who improvises with the view of Michelangelo, which paints the Sixtin chapel, then asks us to imagine how much we want to go back to the 16th century to look at Michelangelo at that position, he adds: This is: is a movie about the position. We believe, really?
But then Mala Emde comes on the screen. She plays Vera, and even though the actor, in the late 20th century, is too old for that matter, she acts Vera’s Teenage Teutonic “Jazz Bunny” obsession with a hell -bent sensuality that says a lot about how people used to throw themselves into worship of art. “Cologne 75” is a less larch, but it has an infectious spirit, which joins the fourth wall -breaking jazz studies offered by a crumpled music critic (Michael Chernus), who knows our appetite for Jarrett’s genius.
Vera, who is only 16 when the film opens, lives in a stately bourgeois apartment with her parents and her nasty brother, Fritz (Leo Meier). Her father (Ulrich Tukur), a screaming dentist, cannot imagine that there is something about the music industry that does not belong in the gutter. But Vera does not slumber. She is shaken from fan to businesswoman when Ronnie Scott (Daniel Betts), the British saxophonist and the club owner, is just enough with her that he asks her to book a tour for him (we see her teach how to do this on the move ). When she talks the head of the opera house to let Jarrett perform on her safe stage (it must be at 23:30, immediately after a performance of Alban Berg Opera “Lulu”), “Cologne 75” has become the old -fashioned thing, a sentimental girl -The power film, even though it was set in an era when a ravenous player like Vera had to cut out his power every step on the road.
She needs 10,000 Deutsche brands to rent the hall, which her mother lends her at the SLU; Vera promises that she will either pay her back or quit the music industry. But all this is just the set for the great mishaps that happens-a kind of cosmic Caprice. We pick up Magaros Jarrett on the road, after a concert in Switzerland, and the reason he and his boss will spend all night driving 500 kilometers to Cologne is that Jarrett must cash in the air ticket sent him if he is have enough money to maintain the tour. It is so doubtful commercially the jazz he plays is.
He has a bad back and a dense wound setting; To sink every night, into the creative center of his soul will do it. (He improvises every concert on the tour.) When he arrives at Cologne, he is confronted with the ultimate insult: he had asked for a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano, but the instrument waiting for him on the stage is a divided, out-of-tune repetition piano With fragile higher and lower registers, a pedal that does not work and a tone that is more shaky than grand. That’s it; Jarrett says he will not perform.
The Vera convinces him to sound like a standard this movie triumph. Except that it is richer than that. The fact that an album as legendary as the “Cologne concert” was improvised on a broken piano may seem irony of ironies, but it was not. The connection was much more directly. Jarrett, who played it piano, had restrictions he was not used to (he had to stay close to the middle area and could not be awkward), so the whole quiet essence in the Cologne concert – the quality that made it speak – emerged from The broken piano. And so is the case that Vera does to convince him: that if he just sits down and plays, the necessity will be the mother of creation. When she persuaded him about it, she did jazz history. You don’t have to be a Keith Jarrett -fan to enjoy “Cologne 75”, but for everyone who is the movie is a tasteful anecdote like colors in his flucky rapture.
