By Orlando Bird, The Telegraph | Fifty years ago this week, a young American jazz pianist on tour in Europe arrived at Cologne’s opera house. He’d slept badly; his back ached. He was due to give an improvised performance to an audience of 1,400 at the agreeable time of 11.30 pm. A logistical mix-up had landed him with the wrong piano – a baby grand meant for rehearsals only, plagued by sticky pedals, lousy tuning and a fickle upper register. And he’d missed his dinner. What followed, however, was a seminal hour in 20th-century music.
By 1975 Keith Jarrett was a known quantity among jazz fans, but the recording of his ill-omened appearance in Germany turned him into something else, something generationally rare in the jazz world: a name familiar to people who didn’t normally listen to jazz. With its pellucid melodies, driving hooks and radiant bursts of virtuosity, all apparently conjured from thin air, The Köln Concert went on to become the best-selling piano album of all time (four million copies and counting) and won Jarrett admirers ranging from Vladimir Ashkenazy to Bruce Hornsby to – yes – Adrian Chiles.
Today, Jarrett – who turned 80 in May – has a strong claim to being one of the world’s greatest living musicians, or even the greatest (as the writer Geoff Dyer has persuasively argued), not just for his solo feats but also his work as a bandleader and interpreter of classical repertoire. But there’s something about the story of The Köln Concert – with its mix of jeopardy, bravado, and sheer, indefatigable talent – that captures the particular nature and scope of his achievements over a long, if not always cloudless, career.
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