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

Neu­ro­science & Jazz Impro­vi­sa­tion: How Impro­vi­sa­tion Shapes Cre­ativ­i­ty and What Hap­pens Inside Our Brain

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.