How Keith Jarrett Played on a Broken Piano & Turned a Potentially Disastrous Concert Into the Best-Selling Piano Album of All Time (1975)
Nearly fifty years ago, the celebrated young pianist Keith Jarrett arrived in the West German city of Köln (better known in English as Cologne). Having just come off a 500-mile-long road trip from Switzerland, where he’d played a concert the previous day, he was left with barely any time to recover before going onstage at the Köln Opera House that night — at 11:30 that night, to be precise, the only time that august cultural institution would give a jazz musician. Because the restaurant where he attempted to have dinner beforehand mixed up his order, he could barely eat a thing before showtime. And his back was acting up.
Yet all of those difficulties were as nothing against the miserable instrument awaiting Jarrett at the opera house. He’d requested a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial grand piano, but a series of errors led to the staff setting up a dilapidated, frail-sounding baby grand of the same make.
Unable to procure a replacement, the concert’s teenage organizer Vera Brandes called in a tuner to do his best to bring the piano up to playability and managed to persuade Jarrett to go on with the show. All the seats were sold, after all, and the recording engineers had their gear ready to roll; in the worst case scenario, he’d end up with another tape for the archives.
In the event, the concert was more of a best-case scenario. “What Keith Jarrett did so brilliantly was to take this broken piano and use it to play music that only that piano could have played,” says Youtuber David Hartley in the video above. “He didn’t hide away from the faults of the piano; instead, he embraced them and put them in the music. This is the very essence of improvisation.” A classical musician with a defined set of pieces could never have worked at all under these conditions, but Jarrett ended up putting on quite a successful show — and, with the recording, putting out a hugely successful album.
After it came out in November that same year, The Köln Concert went on to become both the best-selling solo jazz album and the best-selling piano album. For decades, it was easily found even in the record collections of those who owned no other releases from ECM, the German jazz and avant-garde label with which Jarrett has long been associated, and heard on the soundtracks of films by auteurs like Nicolas Roeg and Nanni Moretti. Still today, it stands in support of any number of proverbs about necessity being the mother of invention, playing the hand you’re dealt, and not waiting for ideal conditions. If we listen to it enough, we may even find ourselves waiting for terrible ones.
Related content:
The Brains of Jazz and Classical Musicians Work Differently, New Research Shows
The Piano Played with 16 Increasing Levels of Complexity: From Easy to Very Complex
The Universal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learning to Play Jazz & The Creative Process
Hear the Experimental Piano Jazz Album by Comedian H. Jon Benjamin — Who Can’t Play Piano
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.