Keith Jarrett - Koln Concert (1975)

I have been starting my mornings listening to this and it is a good companion for a grey morning and empty house.

It begins out with the softness of a HOS-style piano work - and it will return there - but it is an adventurous improvised course. Like our own live improvs Jarret is not perfecting a set song but traveling in a stream of music. I have often wondered how much we 'create' the music and how much the music 'tells us' which way it wants to go. It starts with the gentleness of a grey misty morning but the mind behind it is too active to remain there, his right hand  goes off in energetic dances and explorations and you with it, until it returns again to that hypnotic left-hand's repeated softness with all of its accumulated power. The harder you listen the more musical phrases you can hear flowing by; at times it sounds like Miles Davis, the instrumental music from a Charlie Brown cartoon, a 80s sitcom theme song. Sometime the sheer power of his fingers hurts my ears, other times it sweeps me up with melancholy.

Part of its' charm is the live recording: Jarrett occasionally sings along and taps his foot, the audience wait respectfully after a 'song' to ensure the silence is not part of the improv and according to Wikipedia:

wiki wrote:Subtle laughter may be heard from the audience at the very beginning of "Part I", in response to Jarrett's quoting of the melody of the signal bell which announces the beginning of an opera or concert to patrons at the Köln Opera House, the notes of which are G D C G A.[10] Jarrett himself noted that while he does not remember doing it consciously, he credits it for putting the audience in a good mood that helped him through a difficult concert experience.

Why was it so miserable? Jarret had just driven in from Switzerland, not slept well in several nights and was in pain from back problems and had to wear a brace. Worse they could only find an off-tune piano and Jarrett nearly refused to play but the crappy piano had its own magic

wiki wrote:The instrument was tinny and thin in the upper registers and weak in the bass register, and the pedals did not work properly. Consequently, Jarrett often used ostinatos and rolling left-hand rhythmic figures during his Köln performance to give the effect of stronger bass notes, and concentrated his playing in the middle portion of the keyboard. ECM Records producer Manfred Eicher later said: "Probably played it the way he did because it was not a good piano. Because he could not fall in love with the sound of it, he found another way to get the most out of it."

And that left hand rolls! Here is a semi-technical description of his improv

wiki wrote:A notable aspect of the concert was Jarrett's ability to produce very extensive improvised material over a vamp of one or two chords for prolonged periods of time. For instance, in Part I, he spends almost 12 minutes vamping over the chords Am7 (A minor 7) to G major, sometimes in a slow, rubato feel, and other times in a bluesy, gospel rock feel. For about the last 6 minutes of Part I, he vamps over an A major theme. Roughly the first 8 minutes of Part II A is a vamp over a D major groove with a repeated bass vamp in the left hand, and in Part IIb, Jarrett improvises over an F# minor vamp for about the first 6 minutes.

And here is the Mojo review that got me to listen to it.

Mojo wrote:Few great albums have been made by artists apparently on the verge of falling asleep: The Køln Concert is one of them. Jarrett, in the midst of a European solo tour, reckons he hadn’t slept for 24 hours when he arrived at the Cologne concert hall to tackle an audibly substandard piano. Avoiding the instrument’s tinny high notes, he concentrates on pulsing rhythmic patterns in the middle register whose hypnotic repetition may have had something to do with his exhaustion. The resulting album – a musical triumph over adversity – contains fewer harmonic adventures than normal but a simplicity and passion that resonated far beyond Jarrett’s jazz following.

Jarrett says he was fighting off waves of fatigue as he headed for the stage. ‘When I finally had to play it was a relief because there was nothing more of this story to tell. It was “I am now going out here with this piano … and the hell with everything else.”’ Listening to the tape later on the tour, the pair decided that, dodgy piano or no, the performance had something special – and the resulting record duly received rave reviews. The album’s sales helped turn the tiny ECM label into a major European force and won Jarrett the kind of across-the-board recognition that only a handful of living jazzmen have achieved.

I never of heard of this performance until I read the Mojo review but appartently this is the "best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best-selling piano album"(!) which makes all the more bizarre that YouTube has it locked away so no one can hear it!  Here's a copy on Soundcloud.

https://soundcloud.com/baramuse/keith-jarrett-the-koln-concert-vinyl

Gorgeous recording. Thank you!!