Keith Jarrett
The Köln Concert

"I don't even have a seed when I start playing. It's like starting from scratch. [...] Jazz is letting the light shine. Not trying to enhance it, just letting it be" (K. Jarrett).
These two sentences could suffice to review the entire discography of Keith Jarrett. Anyone who has ever done total improvisation, at any level and on any instrument, knows that the second sentence is damn true. If you even try for a moment to overdo it, to play a note you don't feel, the listener notices and the atmosphere gets tense, so you have to quickly regain your inspiration or else everything goes to hell.

"Only in improvisation does the listener have the opportunity to have a real connection with the musician, without the usual distance that exists in other types of performance. Every note is not written on a score and was not even anticipated beforehand. Every note is in the present and is alive".
These words may not make any sense to some of you, but believe me, the Cologne concert is proof of it. Perhaps this is why no one has been crazy enough to review it so far, because thinking you can explain this music is truly madness. In fact, I will stuff it with quotes from Jarrett. Better to let him speak.

Anyway, the feeling that this was going to be a particular concert (let's say it clearly, a shitty one) came almost immediately, as narrated in one of the classics of anecdotes: January 24, 1975. Jarrett arrived that very day by car from Switzerland, after a sleepless night. He ate fifteen minutes ago in a terrible restaurant. Angry, with sauerkraut sitting in his stomach and heavy eyelids, he reaches the Opera House, where instead of the Bosendorfer grand piano he had ordered, there's a funny instrument that "sounded like a pale imitation of a harpsichord or a barrelhouse piano, was seven feet long and hadn't even been overhauled". Moreover, he was practically forced to play in the central part of the keyboard, since the extremes were rather out of tune.
Backstage, Keith awaits his moment. At this point, he doesn't care anymore, maybe he doesn't even have the pre-concert tingling in his feet. He sits waiting for this tooth to be pulled, with his mind already in America, and his chin on his chest.
The moment arrives. Keith enters, bows, and goes to sit down.
The applause fades.

"The most important thing in my concert is the first note or the first four notes. If they have enough tension, the rest of the concert flows by itself, almost naturally [...] you just have to reach the core of the music, and then it plays itself".
Listen to the first five notes of the concert. More than tense, they are suspended, as if levitating. Then the rest flows by itself.

"If you are an improviser, a real improviser, you must be familiar with ecstasy (I would say "inspiration", editor's note), otherwise you do not connect with the music. When composing, you wait for these particular moments to come (indeed, the inspiration editor's note), whenever that might happen. It may also happen that they do not come today. But when you improvise, at eight o'clock this evening for instance, it is necessary to have such familiarity with this state to be able to reach it anyway".

Many pieces of the concert I know by heart. I've branded them into my brain, like several thousand other people. This record is notoriously Jarrett's best-seller and the only jazz bestseller that isn't a jazz record.
The purists have indeed begun to turn their noses up (and secretly listen and re-listen to it), but someone should explain to them that this is not jazz. It's Keith Jarrett.

Stars: 6/5