Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert is a wonderful record. I adore it, and have done ever since I first heard the ECM Records release of American pianist and composer Keith Jarrett’s 1975 live performance in Germany at some point in the 1980s. The emotional intensity of Jarrett’s improvised solo piano on the album, recorded live in Köln Opera House late at night on a duff piano, continues to move me deeply. I find the gradual trajectory over the record’s three pieces – four on the original vinyl double album, with one split into two out of necessity – a deeply profound experience.
As Jarrett eases his way into things, gently finding his way before building to a propulsive groove, only to pull back to explore a more intimate moment before going on his way again – the performance evolves into a thing of all consuming beauty bordering on the spiritual.
While improvised throughout, Jarrett’s intense flourishes were based on melody, with the result a beauteous three part epic that shifts to and fro in mood and tempo en route to becoming an instantly composed classic. In its exploratory twists and turns, Jarrett seems to be on some kind of pilgrimage, trying to find a way to break on through to the other side, not with some sturm und drang bombast, but my creating a kind of impressionistic sonic poetry.
No wonder The Köln Concert crossed over from its chamber jazz niche enough to become the biggest selling solo piano record ever. If that’s what it is. If we have to get hung up on labels, and we don’t, much of it sounds closer to classical music than jazz.
Either way, listening to The Köln Concert– and you have to really listen – for all its bluesy melodies and twinkling flourishes cascading from Jarrett’s heart and soul and transformed into music, this isn’t ambient background. The Köln Concert demands the listener’s attention. It cannot be ignored.
A couple of weeks ago I received a press release for something called Köln Concert 50. This is set to take place over two performances this weekend at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Nothing unusual there. The city is full of this sort of thing just now, highlighted in a torrent of electronic landfill and forests full of flyers. These can be quickly skimmed over and either discarded or else filed away in case there might be an opportunity to do something with them.
I don’t know whether it was because I already got where it was coming from, but the email press release for called Köln Concert 50 stood out. Like the record it was paying tribute to, it demanded my attention.
As the name suggests, Köln Concert 50 is a fiftieth anniversary or near as dammit performance of The Köln Concert. That’s almost a whole half century of some of the most sublime music ever recorded, when the alchemy of fatigue, a piano that refused to be tuned and the persuasive powers of seventeen-year-old promoter Vera Brandes conspired to make something special.
But hang on a minute. How is that possible? Keith Jarrett is one of the biggest names in the jazz world. He has made a ton of records, both solo and in bands, ever since he started out playing with Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. But he’s 79 now, and hasn’t performed since he had two really bad strokes in 2018. And anyway, even if he could still perform, the Köln Concert was completely improvised, and he’s released a host of other solo concert recordings since, so why would someone so in the moment when he’s performing want to retread the past?
Except, the two performances of Köln Concert 50 that take place this weekend at St Mark’s Unitarian Church on Castle Terrace aren’t performed by Jarrett, but by jazz pianist Dorian Ford. Ford is a new name to me, but according to the All About Jazz website, he started playing when he was a teenager, and in the 1980s worked with a host of musicians who formed the backdrop to the 1980s London jazz renaissance.
Ford won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied under Donald Brown. There are two Jarrett connections here. Jarrett too went to Berklee, by which time he was already an accomplished pianist. Jarrett had been a child prodigy, taking piano lessons when he was three, and performing works by Mozart, Bach and others by the time he was seven before developing an interest in jazz.
Like Jarrett, Brown had played in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, albeit a decade and a half apart, with Jarrett joining in the mid 1960s, while Brown’s stint in the group came in the early 1980s. Also like Jarrett, Ford is an accomplished classical musician, furthering the connection.
Interestingly, it turns out that Ford has worked extensively as an actor. In 1980, he played the title role in Jude, by writer Bill Craske as part of the BBC’s Play for Today strand. Ford played a twelve year old boy meeting his father for the first time. In 1985, Ford appeared in six episodes of BBC children’s drama, Grange Hill, playing Jean-Paul, a French exchange student who ends up snogging regular character, Faye Lucas. Ford went on to appear in Stephen Frears’ film, Mrs Henderson Presents, playing the house pianist for the Windmill Theatre.
Ford has also done soundtracks for assorted TV shows. Ah, soundtracks. The perfect way of getting leftfield music into the mainstream. Not that Keith Jarrett thinks much of his music being co-opted in that way, mind, as we shall see.
But in terms of Köln Concert 50, how do you replicate an improvised concert in any meaningful way, so it isn’t just done by rote? Mercifully, I suspect this isn’t what Ford is about. As highlighted in the publicity blurb for the show, Ford first heard The Köln Concert forty years ago, and began to play it until he could do so from memory. Sure, there was a score that Jarrett eventually put out to keep fanboy obsessives off his back, but eventually Ford decided to take his rendition of this classic piece of work beyond re-enactment, if that’s what it was, and to introduce his own improvisations into the mix.
This is a bold move. While Ford’s rendition stays true to Jarrett’s spirit, it also risks irking the purists who want to hear The Köln Concert played exactly as it is on the record. This response rather misses the point of live music, especially live music that is jazz derived. Interpretation and reinvention of existing works are the entire point here of what might be regarded as a spontaneous remix, that stays true to its source while letting it fly. Just how far Ford takes his rendition of The Köln Concert remains to be seen.
In terms of the effect The Köln Concert had on me, I would put it alongside the work of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, with Cantus in Memorium Benjamin Britten (1977) also seeping into my consciousness around the same time. I think of The Köln Concert in the same way as well of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, (1975/1986), the rediscovered album of Bulgarian folk songs sung by female choirs introduced to 4AD Records boss Ivo Watts Russell by Bauhaus vocalist Pete Murphy. And then there is Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet, Spem in Alium (1570), more of which anon.
But where was it I first heard what is arguably Jarrett’s pivotal work. Was it on the soundtrack to Nicolas Roeg’s fractured psychosexual thriller, Bad Timing (1980), which saw Art Garfunkel’s psychiatrist Alex Linden fall for Theresa Russell’s Milena Flaherty in Vienna with tragic results?
I remember seeing Bad Timing probably the first time it was on telly, and being struck by Roeg’s fragmented cut up style that I recognised from Walkabout (1970) The music too drew me in. The original score for Bad Timing was by Richard Hartley, whose prolific output includes Joseph Losey’s film, The Trout (1982), starring Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Moreau. Hartley also scored Dance with a Stranger (1985), Mike Newell’s Shelagh Delaney scripted film starring Miranda Richardson as Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. He also composed for Stealing Beauty (1996), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Other music used in Bad Timing includes work by Tom Waits, Billie Holliday, The Who, and composer Harry Partch.
The Köln Concert is first heard in Bad Timing fifteen minutes in, when Alex and Milena are at an exhibition in Vienna. After a cryptic exchange while viewing Gustav Klimt’s painting, ‘The Kiss’ (1907-08), they pass by Egon Schiele’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ (1915). As they do, a ten second flourish from the beginning of the final section of ‘Part One’, accompanies a close up of the painting’s haunted looking couple. This comes about twenty minutes in.
Schiele’s painting had already been seen in the film’s opening credits. These were set to Tom Waits’ song, ‘Invitation to the Blues’, from Waits’ album, Small Change (1976). This and the credits run over a scene from Alex and Milena’s same gallery visit. The next sound we hear following Jarrett’s flourish is the siren of the ambulance rushing Milena to hospital following her overdose. We next hear The Köln Concert around fifty seven minutes in, after Alex and Milena argue and have angry sex on the stairs of Milena’s apartment.
It is an hour and fifteen minutes into Bad Timing, however, when The Köln Concert makes its most prolonged appearance in the forensic piecing together of Alex and Milena’s mercurial relationship. With Milena having left Alex, Alex catches sight of Milena through the window of a cafe he is in. Rewinding to the very beginning of ‘Part One’ as Alex pursues Milena, rather than punctuate moments as earlier, Jarrett’s music underscores an uneasy conversation between the now ex couple outside Vienna’s main university building for an uninterrupted four and a half minutes until Milena leaves and Alex is left alone in his car.
The next thirty eight minutes or so are spent with Alex being put through the mill as Harvey Keitel’s tenacious detective pieces together the grisly jigsaw of what happened to Milena. With everything seemingly resolved, the first two minutes or so of ‘Part One’ play again over a scene in New York which runs to the end of the film, when Billie Holliday singing ‘It’s the Same Old Story’ plays over the end credits.
The Köln Concert was there again a while later in State of the Art (1987), a major international six part series on the state of contemporary art in the 1980s. The programme was directed Geoff Dunlop and written by Sandy Nairne, and used the opening minute or so of ‘Part Two’ of the The Köln Concert as its closing theme? Again, watching the programme on Channel Four, I’m not sure I knew what the music was, but it sounded familiar somehow. If I’m honest. I think it reminded me of Vince Guaraldi’s jaunty score for the Charlie Brown cartoons.
Chances are that beyond Bad Timing and State of the Art, my first full experience of The Köln Concert will have been on a cassette my mate Brian played me around that time. Brian played me this along with other Jarrett stuff like the equally intense Book of Ways (1987), a series of nineteen improvisations on a clavichord. It was certainly Brian who told me of Jarrett’s involuntary grunts and groans that accompanied his playing on the Köln Concert and other solo records. I wonder if Dorian Ford might do some method acting during his performances this weekend?
For some reason, The Köln Concert also makes me think of the famous love scene in an earlier Roeg film, Don’t Look Now (1973), when Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s characters find some kind of healing through sexual intimacy following the death of their little girl. The way the scene is edited, with a series of cuts from the couple’s lovemaking to them getting dressed afterwards, seems to possess a similar sense of emotional empathy as the record. The scene in Don’t Look Nowgoes beyond sex to become something transcendent. You might call it love.
The score to Don’t Look Now was actually by Italian composer Pino Donaggio, who would go on to compose for films by Brian De Palma, Joe Dante and many others. However evocative Donaggio’s piano and flute based score for Don’t Look Now remains, one might imagine The Köln Concert would work just as well. Try watching that scene with the sound turned down while playing Jarrett’s record, however, and unless it was edited in some way, it wouldn’t work. The rhythms are all wrong.. And anyway, Jarrett’s performance was still two years away yet when Roeg’s film was released.
The Köln Concert may be wonderful, but you have to be careful with it. By the time bits of it appeared in Bad Timing and at the end of State of the Art, it had already shown up on a couple of soundtracks. According to IMDB, ‘Part 1’ of The Köln Concert had featured in a film called Kinky Tricks (1977). This is described in a note as ‘a piece of San Francisco hardcore’ about a prostitute turning up on the doorstep of a former client looking for a place to stay. The unexpected guest duly turns the place into a bordello, and sexual liaisons ensue. IMDB also tells me that ‘Part 1’ featured in gay porn flick, Operation Lightning Rod (1978), which apparently also featured music by John Cale and Terry Riley.
In 1992, in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, Jarrett bemoaned the use of The Köln Concert in film, declaring that the record had become nothing more than a soundtrack. Despite Jarrett’s attitude towards his work, beyond and perhaps because of its use on movie soundtracks, The Köln Concert has developed a ubiquity that has helped music that might otherwise be marginalised cross over into the mainstream.
This is a bit like when Blake Edwards’s film, 10 (1979), saw a Hollywood composer played by real life composer Dudley Moore gets it on with a young woman played by Bo Derek to a soundtrack of Ravel’s Bolero (1928). The unintended consequence was of British ice-skating couple’s Olympic gold medal winning routine also set to Bolero.
Thomas Tallis’s 40 part motet, Spem in Alium (1570), meanwhile, was used in Kevin Macdonald’s documentary, Touching the Void (2003), and in Stephen Poliakoff’s TV film, Gideon’s Daughter (2006), starring Bill Nighy and Emily Blunt. More recently, and perhaps more famously, it was used in S&M thriller, Fifty Shades of Grey(2015). It’s a film I’ve never watched, primarily because I love Spem in Aliumas much as I love the Köln Concert, and I don’t want it spoilt by a glossy soft porn flick.
But maybe I’m being a snob. A 2015 article by Peter Phillips in the Spectator magazine defended the fuse of Spem in Alium in Fifty Shades of Grey, declaring that it didn’t matter where or how you heard the work, as long as you heard it. So it goes too with the Köln Concert and all its big screen incarnations, from Kinky Tricks to Bad Timing and beyond. Keith Jarrett may or may not approve. It may not be the movies, but I’m sure Dorian Ford will do the Köln Concert proud.
Köln Concert 50, St Mark’s Unitarian Church, Castle Terrace, Sunday August 18, 8.30pm; Monday August 19, 6.30pm.