On January 24, 1975, Keith Jarrett gave a solo piano performance at the Opera House in Cologne, Germany. The concert lasted a little over an hour, it was entirely improvised, and it was recorded and turned into a double album, “The Köln 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. Think Billy Joel and Elton John, and also Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock and Jan Hammer and Jarrett. There are Keith Jarrett albums that have more pyrotechnical dazzle than “The Köln Concert” (like “Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne,” from 1973, in which he gets into a contrapuntalism that makes him sound like J.S. Bach with a gospel groove). But “The Köln Concert,” for all its joyful tumult, exudes a vibe that’s very much of its mellowed-out era. It’s exultant but soothing. At times it evokes the pastoral moods that would make the New Age pianist George Winston so popular, and at others it’s the aural equivalent of an impressionist painting of the most haunting sunset you ever saw. As a pianist, Jarrett was like the soul brother of Rachmaninoff crossed with a sentimental free-jazz rhapsodist. In “The Köln Concert,” he improvised an eager cacophony that people have listened to for 50 years as a kind of meditation. It’s music to bliss out to.
“Köln 75,” Ido Fluk’s slender and quirky and lightly diverting music biopic, tells the story of that concert. It’s about how Jarrett’s fabled performance nearly didn’t happen, and how even when it did, it was a case of making lemonade from lemons, since various factors suggested that it would be a disaster. But though Jarrett is a character in “Köln 75” (he’s played, with compelling intensity, by John Magaro), the movie is really about everything that led up to the concert. The central character, Vera Brandes (Mala Emde), is the 18-year-old spitfire who organized the concert, promoted it, and — at a crucial moment — cajoled Jarrett into going through with it, after he had decided to back out.
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You won’t hear a drop of Keith Jarrett’s music in “Köln 75.” Early on, when a narrator compares the sound of Jarrett improvising to the sight of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, then asks us to imagine how much we’d like to go back to the 16th century to watch Michelangelo up on that scaffolding, he adds: This is a movie about the scaffolding. We think, really?
But then Mala Emde comes onscreen. She plays Vera, and though the actor, in her late 20s, is too old for the part, she acts out Vera’s teenage Teutonic “jazz bunny” obsession with a hell-bent sensuality that says a lot about the way that people used to throw themselves into the worship of art. “Köln 75” is a minor lark, but it has an infectious spirit, goosed along by fourth-wall-breaking jazz tutorials offered up by a rumpled music critic (Michael Chernus), who whets 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 scowling dentist, can’t imagine that there’s anything about the music business that doesn’t belong in the gutter. But Vera isn’t slumming. She’s jolted from fan to businesswoman when Ronnie Scott (Daniel Betts), the British saxophonist and club owner, is just smitten enough with her that he asks her to book a tour for him (we see her teach herself how to do this on the fly). By the time she’s talking the head of the Opera House into allowing Jarrett to perform on its fabled stage (it will have to be at 11:30 p.m., directly after a performance of the Alban Berg opera “Lulu”), “Köln 75” has become that old-fashioned thing, a sentimental girl-power movie, though set in an era when a voracious player like Vera had to carve out her power every step of the way.
She needs 10,000 Deutsche Marks to rent the hall, which her mother lends her on the sly; Vera promises that she’ll either pay her back or quit the music business. But all of this is merely the set-up for the major mishap that happens — a kind of cosmic caprice. We pick up Magaro’s Jarrett on the road, after a concert in Switzerland, and the reason that he and his manager will spend all night driving the 500 kilometers to Cologne is that Jarrett needs to cash in the plane ticket the record company sent him if he’s going to have enough money to sustain the tour. That’s how questionably commercial the jazz he’s playing is.
He’s got a bad back and a tightly wound attitude; sinking, each night, into the hunched-over creative center of his soul will do that. (He’s improvising every concert on the tour.) Arriving in Cologne, he’s confronted with the ultimate insult: He had asked for a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand piano, but the instrument waiting for him onstage is a broken-down, out-of-tune rehearsal piano with rickety higher and lower registers, a pedal that doesn’t work, and a tone that’s more shaky than grand. That’s it; Jarrett says he won’t perform.
That Vera convinces him to sounds like a standard the-show-must-go-on movie triumph. Except that it’s richer than that. The fact that an album as legendary as “The Köln Concert” was improvised on a broken piano may seem the irony of ironies, but it wasn’t. The connection was far more direct. Jarrett, playing that piano, had limitations he wasn’t used to (he had to stick near the middle range and couldn’t be flashy), so the whole tranquil essence of the Köln concert — the quality that made it speak — emerged from that broken piano. And that’s the case that Vera makes to convince him: that if he just sits down and plays, necessity will be the mother of creation. In persuading him of that, she made jazz history. You don’t need to be a Keith Jarrett fan to enjoy “Köln 75,” but for anyone who is the movie is a savory anecdote that colors in his fluky rapture.