Chris Knipp
10-17-2025, 02:52 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20rnn.jpg
MALA EMDE IN KÖLN 75
IDO FLUK: KÖLN 75 (2025)
A zealous teenage German promoter turns a doomed concert into the most famous solo piano album of all time
This story begins with keyboard artist Keith Jarrett: his brilliance, his passion, and the risky ego that led him in the early seventies to start touring halls playing solo piano concerts improvised entirely from scratch each night. But a primary focus of this film is someone most of us never previously heard of: a teenage German girl called Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) - sixteen when first seen, claiming to be twenty-five - whose drive, ambition, and desire to prove her dentist father wrong about her lack of a future in music promotion led her to stage a concert that seemed doomed, but has gone on to sell over 3.5 million albums.
The Köln Concert (TKC) is a live solo piano improvisation double album (two-discs on vinyl) by Jarrett recorded at the Opera House in Köln, West Germany on 24 January 1975 that is reportedly both the all time best-selling solo jazz album and the all time best-selling piano album. Jarrett is eighty now and, crippled by strokes since 2018, unable to play with his left hand, but this achievement is likely to stand. Jarrett is worth remembering because of his versatility, not only in those glorious, wildly self-indulgent and awesomely confident solo improvisation concert performances - I've been listening to them for a while and one can happily get lost in them for many an hour - but his beloved jazz Standards Trio with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, and, not to be forgotten, a number of fine classical recordings. Jarrett is a uniquely versatile musical personality, was so in 1975 and remains so.
His first notable solo improvisation album was earlier, and was called Facing You. On its fiftieth anniversary pianist Kenny Werner said (https://downbeat.com/news/detail/keith-jarretts-seminal-facing-you-turns-50)of the seminal album, "For me, it changed everything," explaining, "He introduced a totally fresh way of playing over his changes. It sounded totally original."
The Cologne concert all started with Ronnie Scott. And a 16-year-old Vera Brandes who wanted to make money. In the couple of years since Ronnie asked her to book him, just assuming she could and turning out to be right, she had built a career as a concert promoter. She had panache, it seems. Jazz Bunny, a big headline called her, in a flashy article her family mocked her for. Soon she had booked a lot of jazz acts, making enough to move out of the family home and rent her own office. It was jazz, not rock n' roll, she was booking. Berlin in the seventies was a jazz mecca.
This film dramatizes all this - Vera's life - and the "scaffolding" she built - in the filmmaker's metaphor - by creating a framework in which the Köln concert could happen.
The early seventies was a time of ferment and musical crossover and Keith Jarrett was a kind of crux or apex of those explorations. Jarrett was a prodigy keyboardist - he rejected an invitation to study classical piano with Nadia Boulanger in Paris to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston with its strong jazz focus. Jarrett had been a pianist for Miles Davis. Miles reportedly asked him to play in his group three times before he consented, this film tells us, suggesting that shows a great degree of panache or chutzpah. Miles Davis' searing Bitches Brew had come out in March 30, 1970. His hypnotic In a Silent Way was from the year previous. Miles had expressed incomprehension of Jarrett's ability to play "out of nothing."
In Berlin the girl saw Keith Jarrett play the first time. Jarrett is played by John Magaro, who has fuzzy hair, but doesn't much resemble Jarrett. But remember, this is a recollection of Vera Brandes (Mala Emde, old for the role, being the age Brandes claimed to be, not the age she was). Vera set her sights on the Cologne Opera House, rebuilt in modernist style after the war and having 1,300 seats. Vera insisted. The evening she wanted Alban Berg's opera Lulu. was scheduled. Then it will have to be after eleven, when the instruments were removed and the place cleaned up. Eleven p.m. in January? January 24? You are mad, the theater manager says. But she goes ahead, knowing she will need nothing - only the opera house's Bösendorfer Imperial concert grand piano. But that Bosendorfer turned out to be the biggest problem.
There was a big Keith Jarrett solo concert in Lausanne before Cologne. He was coming from the Swiss city to the German one to play now.
Another key figure in this tale is Manfred Eicher (Alexander Scheer), a record producer and founder of ECM records. He was touring with Jarrett, and ECM was destined to be a major supporter of Jarrett and recorder of his improvisations. Also important here is Michael Watts (Michael Chernus), a journalist who wrote about jazz sent to interview Keith Jarrett. Watts talks directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. He tells us how hard it is to improvise completely. Even the most advanced jazz players don't do it. They hang their playing on "standards" or a set composition and number of bars, Watts explains to us.
Jarrett is exhausted by these one-hour pure-improvisation concerts. Before Cologne, he is strung out from the coughing in the audience, and he has a bad back which is bothering him. He and Manfred are driving on the tour in a little car to save money, because it turns out they are cashing in the plane tickets the promoter gives them at the airports to have the funds to continue on the tour. It's not making money. Michael Watts bums a ride with them and writes about Keith without admitting he has been in the car because---no interviews!
Jarrett's 1975 Cologne album isn't his first but the third in this mode, nor necessarily his best, but his most famous. The first was the aforementioned Facing You (Oslo 1971), the second Bremen/Lausanne (1973). Director Ido Fluk has gathered actors to recreate the event that is now legendary. Keith Jarrett's fans are worshipful, and they will want to watch and fantasize about what it would have been like to be there that cold January night in Cologne when the magic happened.
This film shows how you can make something lasting and famous out of virtually nothing. That goes, in a way, for the film itself. It gets some things right: for example, that Keith Jarrett's solo piano improvisations are not jazz (not just jazz, not just classical; a kind of crossover genre). They are something special also because, as the film stresses through Michael Watts, improvisation from scratch is very hard to do. These can be contrasted with Brad Meldau's solo improv piano concerts, for instance, which are wide-ranging, but return to known elements. Jarrett's material is abstract. Mehldau, while also improvising, frequently incorporates pre-composed material, including classical pieces and his own compositions, into his solo shows. Jarrett never did that. Jarrett's more remote, etheriel solo concerts take their wrapt audiences out into somewhere in outer space.
It's not entirely clear how it happens, but at eleven p.m. that January night the Cologne Opera House has sold out for Jarrett's concert. We have seen Vera had work to promote it with handbills, radio announcements, and in the end even selling tickets directly on the street. This film is about that promotion, and that energy. And always the almost-didn't-happen element of the event.
And there is drama. When the day came, they couldn't get that Bösendorfer Imperial Grand. It wasn't there. The piano that was there was lousy. In the final hours before the concert, while Alban Berg's opera Lulu is being performed at the opera house, Vera is rushing around finding piano tuners and persuading them to tune the lousy piano with the opera in the background. They have to work some kind of magic. But, apparently, Keith Jarrett worked some kind of magic too; and so did Vera.
Given the terrible conditions, particularly the lousy piano, Jarrett wanted to cancel the recording. (They could not cancel the concert.) But Manfred said the engineers were scheduled to be there, so they agreed to go ahead and record - but just for their own information, they thought. It did not turn out that way.
The film doesn't use sounds from the actual concert recording, just a few hints of Jarrett's playing, but hopefully viewers, even non-Jarrett fans, will understand that he did weave magic in his solo improvisations. That's why there is this story to be told. Jarrett's solo playing is special. It's not to dance to or rock to. It's to sit with folded hands and let it flow over you. It can be somewhat overpowering. If it works, it can feel transcendent - that's why staging this concert in the hour before midnight made sense, after all.
Köln 75 will appeal to Keith Jarrett fans, but could lead others to take a listen. This is a cute story about youthful drive, and also a piece of modern musical history.
Köln 75, 112 mins., premiered at the Berlinale Feb. 16, 2025; also Sofia, Istanbul; and opened in eight other countries. Now opening in the US, Oct. 17 in New York, Oct. 24 in Los Angeles.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/kjrt.jpg
KEITH JARRETT PERFORMING IN GERMANY IN 1975
MALA EMDE IN KÖLN 75
IDO FLUK: KÖLN 75 (2025)
A zealous teenage German promoter turns a doomed concert into the most famous solo piano album of all time
This story begins with keyboard artist Keith Jarrett: his brilliance, his passion, and the risky ego that led him in the early seventies to start touring halls playing solo piano concerts improvised entirely from scratch each night. But a primary focus of this film is someone most of us never previously heard of: a teenage German girl called Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) - sixteen when first seen, claiming to be twenty-five - whose drive, ambition, and desire to prove her dentist father wrong about her lack of a future in music promotion led her to stage a concert that seemed doomed, but has gone on to sell over 3.5 million albums.
The Köln Concert (TKC) is a live solo piano improvisation double album (two-discs on vinyl) by Jarrett recorded at the Opera House in Köln, West Germany on 24 January 1975 that is reportedly both the all time best-selling solo jazz album and the all time best-selling piano album. Jarrett is eighty now and, crippled by strokes since 2018, unable to play with his left hand, but this achievement is likely to stand. Jarrett is worth remembering because of his versatility, not only in those glorious, wildly self-indulgent and awesomely confident solo improvisation concert performances - I've been listening to them for a while and one can happily get lost in them for many an hour - but his beloved jazz Standards Trio with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, and, not to be forgotten, a number of fine classical recordings. Jarrett is a uniquely versatile musical personality, was so in 1975 and remains so.
His first notable solo improvisation album was earlier, and was called Facing You. On its fiftieth anniversary pianist Kenny Werner said (https://downbeat.com/news/detail/keith-jarretts-seminal-facing-you-turns-50)of the seminal album, "For me, it changed everything," explaining, "He introduced a totally fresh way of playing over his changes. It sounded totally original."
The Cologne concert all started with Ronnie Scott. And a 16-year-old Vera Brandes who wanted to make money. In the couple of years since Ronnie asked her to book him, just assuming she could and turning out to be right, she had built a career as a concert promoter. She had panache, it seems. Jazz Bunny, a big headline called her, in a flashy article her family mocked her for. Soon she had booked a lot of jazz acts, making enough to move out of the family home and rent her own office. It was jazz, not rock n' roll, she was booking. Berlin in the seventies was a jazz mecca.
This film dramatizes all this - Vera's life - and the "scaffolding" she built - in the filmmaker's metaphor - by creating a framework in which the Köln concert could happen.
The early seventies was a time of ferment and musical crossover and Keith Jarrett was a kind of crux or apex of those explorations. Jarrett was a prodigy keyboardist - he rejected an invitation to study classical piano with Nadia Boulanger in Paris to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston with its strong jazz focus. Jarrett had been a pianist for Miles Davis. Miles reportedly asked him to play in his group three times before he consented, this film tells us, suggesting that shows a great degree of panache or chutzpah. Miles Davis' searing Bitches Brew had come out in March 30, 1970. His hypnotic In a Silent Way was from the year previous. Miles had expressed incomprehension of Jarrett's ability to play "out of nothing."
In Berlin the girl saw Keith Jarrett play the first time. Jarrett is played by John Magaro, who has fuzzy hair, but doesn't much resemble Jarrett. But remember, this is a recollection of Vera Brandes (Mala Emde, old for the role, being the age Brandes claimed to be, not the age she was). Vera set her sights on the Cologne Opera House, rebuilt in modernist style after the war and having 1,300 seats. Vera insisted. The evening she wanted Alban Berg's opera Lulu. was scheduled. Then it will have to be after eleven, when the instruments were removed and the place cleaned up. Eleven p.m. in January? January 24? You are mad, the theater manager says. But she goes ahead, knowing she will need nothing - only the opera house's Bösendorfer Imperial concert grand piano. But that Bosendorfer turned out to be the biggest problem.
There was a big Keith Jarrett solo concert in Lausanne before Cologne. He was coming from the Swiss city to the German one to play now.
Another key figure in this tale is Manfred Eicher (Alexander Scheer), a record producer and founder of ECM records. He was touring with Jarrett, and ECM was destined to be a major supporter of Jarrett and recorder of his improvisations. Also important here is Michael Watts (Michael Chernus), a journalist who wrote about jazz sent to interview Keith Jarrett. Watts talks directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. He tells us how hard it is to improvise completely. Even the most advanced jazz players don't do it. They hang their playing on "standards" or a set composition and number of bars, Watts explains to us.
Jarrett is exhausted by these one-hour pure-improvisation concerts. Before Cologne, he is strung out from the coughing in the audience, and he has a bad back which is bothering him. He and Manfred are driving on the tour in a little car to save money, because it turns out they are cashing in the plane tickets the promoter gives them at the airports to have the funds to continue on the tour. It's not making money. Michael Watts bums a ride with them and writes about Keith without admitting he has been in the car because---no interviews!
Jarrett's 1975 Cologne album isn't his first but the third in this mode, nor necessarily his best, but his most famous. The first was the aforementioned Facing You (Oslo 1971), the second Bremen/Lausanne (1973). Director Ido Fluk has gathered actors to recreate the event that is now legendary. Keith Jarrett's fans are worshipful, and they will want to watch and fantasize about what it would have been like to be there that cold January night in Cologne when the magic happened.
This film shows how you can make something lasting and famous out of virtually nothing. That goes, in a way, for the film itself. It gets some things right: for example, that Keith Jarrett's solo piano improvisations are not jazz (not just jazz, not just classical; a kind of crossover genre). They are something special also because, as the film stresses through Michael Watts, improvisation from scratch is very hard to do. These can be contrasted with Brad Meldau's solo improv piano concerts, for instance, which are wide-ranging, but return to known elements. Jarrett's material is abstract. Mehldau, while also improvising, frequently incorporates pre-composed material, including classical pieces and his own compositions, into his solo shows. Jarrett never did that. Jarrett's more remote, etheriel solo concerts take their wrapt audiences out into somewhere in outer space.
It's not entirely clear how it happens, but at eleven p.m. that January night the Cologne Opera House has sold out for Jarrett's concert. We have seen Vera had work to promote it with handbills, radio announcements, and in the end even selling tickets directly on the street. This film is about that promotion, and that energy. And always the almost-didn't-happen element of the event.
And there is drama. When the day came, they couldn't get that Bösendorfer Imperial Grand. It wasn't there. The piano that was there was lousy. In the final hours before the concert, while Alban Berg's opera Lulu is being performed at the opera house, Vera is rushing around finding piano tuners and persuading them to tune the lousy piano with the opera in the background. They have to work some kind of magic. But, apparently, Keith Jarrett worked some kind of magic too; and so did Vera.
Given the terrible conditions, particularly the lousy piano, Jarrett wanted to cancel the recording. (They could not cancel the concert.) But Manfred said the engineers were scheduled to be there, so they agreed to go ahead and record - but just for their own information, they thought. It did not turn out that way.
The film doesn't use sounds from the actual concert recording, just a few hints of Jarrett's playing, but hopefully viewers, even non-Jarrett fans, will understand that he did weave magic in his solo improvisations. That's why there is this story to be told. Jarrett's solo playing is special. It's not to dance to or rock to. It's to sit with folded hands and let it flow over you. It can be somewhat overpowering. If it works, it can feel transcendent - that's why staging this concert in the hour before midnight made sense, after all.
Köln 75 will appeal to Keith Jarrett fans, but could lead others to take a listen. This is a cute story about youthful drive, and also a piece of modern musical history.
Köln 75, 112 mins., premiered at the Berlinale Feb. 16, 2025; also Sofia, Istanbul; and opened in eight other countries. Now opening in the US, Oct. 17 in New York, Oct. 24 in Los Angeles.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/kjrt.jpg
KEITH JARRETT PERFORMING IN GERMANY IN 1975