KEITH JARRETT - The Köln Concert

The art of improvisation has ancient, remote origins; it is most likely the primordial form of music, the one least tied to the archetypal structures that, accumulating over the course of civilization's evolution, have progressively regimented this age-old art.

This possibility of extreme freedom in musical expression has been exploited repeatedly throughout the history of music, counting among its "specialists" some of the pivotal names of that history (Scarlatti, Händel, Bach, Mozart, Clementi, Beethoven, Liszt, Cochreau).

But it's probably in jazz that the art of improvisation reached unmatched heights of artistry and complexity. Indeed, it became that genre's defining form, the linchpin of its most important structure: the jam session.

On the evening of January 24, 1975, something magical happened at the Opera Haus in Cologne. Keith Jarrett, a pianist who had been on the scene for barely a decade, having come up through Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis, had for some years been engaged in a fruitful collaboration with the German record producer Manfred Eicher (founder of the storied label ECM). In 1973 he had launched a series of concerts (Bremen and Lausanne) in which he approached the piano completely blind, with no aid or support whatsoever, in a kind of total improvisation that drew not only on his jazz experience but also on his rock-solid classical training (he started playing at age three, was already composing by seven, and studied at the Berklee School of Music).

That evening, Jarrett had asked for a Steinway to be brought on stage, his favorite piano, the one on which he had cultivated the art of improvisation for years. Something went wrong and the Steinway never arrived; while many on the organizing side began to tremble (Jarrett would also become notorious for his prima donna outbursts), the pianist asked that one of the two Bösendorfers waiting backstage be brought out instead, after trying them both. But that night was destined to be a special one, and, as the height of bad luck would have it, due to a mix-up the wrong Bösendorfer was brought on stage. Everyone, Eicher included, was on the verge of throwing in the towel; but not Jarrett, who saw in that setback an extra spur to do something exceptional. With considerable delay, the concert began.

The opening notes are tentative, as if Jarrett and the Bösendorfer were two beasts sizing each other up, eye to eye. The sound of the piano was something beyond the grimmest expectations; it seemed to come from a barrel-house instrument (apparently it hadn't even been serviced!) rather than a grand concert piano. The upper register bordered on shrill, the bass on muffled; honestly, anyone else would have shut the lid and said goodnight to the audience!

The first few minutes are the real-time depiction of suspense unfolding live, but then Jarrett throws himself headlong into this adventure that, for better or worse, would shape the pan-jazz and new age sensibility of the following 20 years. An adventure lasting roughly an hour in total; the concert is made up of 4 parts, or rather, two parts and four sections (part I, part IIa, part IIb, part IId).

The Gould-like humming, the complex, multiply-inverted chords (sevenths and ninths abound), the left hand trapped in very long pauses, the stomping of the right foot on the pedal, and those extremely long scales alternating major and minor modes in a rapid, hybrid, unresolved flow for at least 15 minutes, all characterize the first part (lasting roughly 26 minutes), which, after an extremely complex modulation, closes with a gospel-flavored surge (a fundamental reference point in Jarrett's jazz).

The second part, section IIa, immediately reveals the timbrally constrained environment in which the performance's harmony was born and developed; with his left hand on the bass, Jarrett could do nothing but seek out the most obsessive rhythms (and he found them!) among rapid repeated notes and octave leaps on secondary accents. A spasmodic, obsessive rhythm over which scattered fragments of ragtime melody take turns, no sooner born than they tangle themselves around the blue notes (natural F and natural C, but also B flat), forming a melodic impasse rarely found elsewhere in jazz discography (one can't help but think of the greatest jazz pianist of all time, Art Tatum). All of it confined between low D and high C, the interval that held the only expressive possibilities of that Bösendorfer.

The second section, IIb, is probably the greatest legacy left to the whole wave of new age pianists who would soon flood the record market; after a calm opening that quickly turns hypnotic, occasionally broken by small upward flourishes like the sudden ripples that disturb the still waters of some southern swamp, the piece gives itself over to a long, exhausting series of trills and tremolos that, through an extremely intricate modulation — so much so as to genuinely lose any sense of harmonic and rhythmic orientation (6+3/16, 12+2/16, 5/8, 6+2/8, 7/8, 9/8 are the time signatures that follow one another) — carries us from the opening key of A major to A flat major. On this key Jarrett closes the piece with a very long coda that echoes the atmosphere of the concert's opening.

A brief pause, and Jarrett, after 50 minutes in which he has essentially exhausted every expressive possibility of that instrument, leads the audience back into the sovereign realm of jazz. It is a return "to the house of the fathers" (Powell above all, recall his Body and Soul), a piece in which the harmonic and chromatic patterns of standards serve as a foundation for a right hand that continues venturing into breathtaking yet extremely melodic scales and arpeggios. Everything settles into the soft coda in C major, as placid as the ending of Schumann's Fantasia.

Eicher and Jarrett, after listening back to the tape, decided that, despite all the setbacks, the recorded material was "musically coherent" and, thanks to engineer Wieland, it was enhanced for release. The concert was first issued as a double LP and distributed that same year; Time magazine, also in 1975, awarded The Köln Concert its Record of the Year Award. By 1978 it had already sold nearly 1,500,000 copies, a figure rarely approached in jazz. In 1990 ECM released a remastered version of The Köln Concert on a single CD, a choice that proved to be spot on, bringing total sales to nearly 5,000,000 copies! In 1974, an American magazine put it this way: "[Jarrett] is a master of improvisation and possesses a technique that pianists of the caliber of Horowitz or Rubinstein might admire; his technique is the most remarkable since Art Tatum". Not long after, Jarrett would further explore this essentially harmonic-melodic "European" heritage of his (first through artistic partnerships, then through recordings of Bach, Händel, Mozart and Shostakovich), making clear even to his detractors the true impact this American from Pennsylvania had on the pan-jazz sensibility. The Köln Concert is the key to his improvisational pianism and to how, within it, "classical" training is placed in the service of gospel, ragtime, and jazz as a whole.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

24/12/2019