How Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert Went From Disaster To Transcendence

Pulling Heaven Down From Hell

Nine months before I was born, and halfway around the world, a famous Jazz musician pondered whether his career was over because of what had happened earlier that night.

On January 24th, 1975, Keith Jarrett was at the peak of his artistic skill as an acoustic solo Jazz pianist. He was on a European tour, and his record company was recording these concerts in the hopes of one or more commercial releases.

This night had been a disaster before he’d even arrived in Cologne after a three-hundred-fifty-mile drive from a concert he’d just given in Zurich. After several sleepless nights and a tweaked back, he was exhausted and hadn’t felt relief in many days. Finally, he arrived at the Köln Opera House and looked for Vera Brandes, the youngest concert promoter in Germany. She was 17 and a passionate fan of Jazz. She had made this night happen.

It would be the first time Jazz music was ever allowed to be played in the famous Opera House, which was established in 1957 but had a much longer history of presenting transcendent music and performance in Germany. Because no Jazz music would ever take priority over the Opera, Jarrett wasn’t set to play until 11:30 PM that night. He thought there was plenty of time to rest and eat before his performance.

Nothing went as planned that night.

Jarrett’s agreement stipulated that he must play on a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial Concert Grand Piano. Unfortunately, that piano didn’t make it to the stage, and instead, he was offered a smaller Bösendorfer Baby Grand that wasn’t even a performance piano. It had a busted sustain pedal. The tunings were off and murky because the strings were old. The piano was used only for Opera rehearsals, and at that point, Jarrett was ready to cancel the entire show and refund all 1,300 tickets.

Maybe it was because Brandes was young. It was said she had a breakdown. What we can be sure happened is that something about her reaction to his wanting to cancel the show evoked mercy from Jarrett, cutting through his exhaustion, pain, and mounting frustration. Two human beings agreed in their souls to commit to this artistic performance, with all its limitations. The goal was to meet expectations. Instead, they punched a hole in time and let light pour into our world, where it was captured on wax.

The Opera piano technicians got to work, and Jarrett went off to have a pre-arranged meal at a nearby restaurant. In a concert like this, instruments are generally tuned during soundcheck and then tuned again just before the performance. The technicians did what they could, but the old strings, the broken pedals, and the stubborn keys could not be fixed; they could only be accepted.

When Jarrett arrived at the restaurant, they had no idea he was coming. He ate a fast plate of whatever they could scrounge up for him, but it was barely enough. His back hurt worse than ever. He winced from the brace that had barely held him together the last few days. And when he got back to the Opera House, the piano wasn’t in much better condition than when he’d left.

Exhausted. Suffering in near agony. Hungry. His instrument is broken before he even puts his fingers on the keys. Yet, he is about to produce living art in front of an audience of foreign strangers in their homeland.

The first 26 minutes is a meditation, and as we listen, we can hear the artist feeling for the edges of what the instrument is capable of doing. Then he starts singing melodies to accompany the rough edges of the music he is limited to producing. He’s gentle with the pedals at first.

He composes a flawed masterpiece over the next 48 minutes, nearly destroying the piano. There is a scene in Star Trek VI in which Sulu is the Captain of his own starship and is called to rescue Captain Kirk, who is in mortal peril. He orders warp 9, and an Ensign informs him that the ship will fly apart. Sulu snarls at the junior officer, “THEN FLY HER APART!” Keith Jarrett was sitting at that Baby Grand piano, playing music that had never been heard before inside those walls or even outside them. And he was flying the ship apart.

As the piano failed and died throughout the performance, somehow, the music became even more inspired. Then, finally, notes just stopped playing, and Jarrett had to play around them, like secrets that die with the people who know them but grow to become legends instead.

The flaws of his instrument became part of the performance. Grace under the pressure of annihilation is a situation that very few artists ever find themselves in. Most fail forever by not even trying, haunted by memories that never cease replaying during their worst moments of regret. Rarely is an artist thrown into the pit of Hell and finds the audacity to match skill enough to reach up and pull Heaven down to drown out the flames. Yet, that is what happened that night.

The Köln Concert remains the best-selling piano album of all time.