Sometimes success finds you when you least expect it. When Keith Jarret took his place at a rickety old Bösendorfer – so the story goes – on a cold January evening in 1975, nobody ever expected the evening to produce one of the most successful jazz albums ever. The pianist, then aged 30, took his audience on a completely improvised musical journey that evening, but it was the live recording that turned an ordinary concert at Cologne Opera House into The Köln Concert. 

Keith Jarrett, piano prodigy 

Keith Jarrett’s story began like that of many child prodigies. Piano lessons before his third birthday, a first concert when he was seven, and an extensive musical education in which he learned to play Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and more. Before he was even 20 years old, he was offered the chance to study with none other than Nadia Boulanger, but the siren song of New York called louder. What’s more, that siren song sounded a lot like the jazz music of Dave Brubeck, a consummate improviser with a solid background in classical and contemporary music. In the vibrant New York of the 1960s, Keith Jarrett began his career as a jazz pianist with Charles Lloyd, among others, and he later worked briefly for Miles Davis. He went on to set up two quartets of his own in the 1970s, one in the US and one in Europe. 

During performances with those quartets, Jarrett demonstrated an exceptional talent for improvisation. With that experience under his belt, he started doing solo concerts consisting of new, improvised music from the first minute to the last. In other words, he went far further than ornamenting or playing around with composed pieces or famous jazz standards. In the period between 1971 and 1976, he released a stunning 25 albums on four different labels. He composed or improvised almost all the music on those recordings himself. The fact that he could release so much music without saturating the market says much about his popularity, but it also has to do with the enormous range of his work. He played as a soloist, but also in small ensembles, and he even recorded orchestral and organ music. In a review of his album In the Light from 1973, he was compared to Beethoven. So Keith Jarrett was as much a composer as a musician, and in fact it is impossible to separate the two in his case. Even when he focused more on the piano concertos of Mozart and Bartók in the 1980s – after all, he had classical training – he tried to get under the composers’ skin. In an interview from 1984, he described this as follows:  

“To even get past what is banal about Mozart’s music means you have to understand the language he speaks. To understand that language means you have to know about fortepianos and harpsichords to hear the sound he heard. Once you get into all these things, you start to realize how few people play Mozart, you know? Most people play themselves playing Mozart, and the more they ignore that side of things, the more they would be playing their own natural tendencies rather than Mozart’s music.” 

In other words, when he sits at the piano, he wants to experience what the composers themselves once experienced and to convey the music as authentically as possible. Later in the same interview, he speaks of feeling ecstasy. The moment when making music transcends thought and he, the performer, steps outside himself. Anyone who has ever seen Jarrett at work – or watched images of his performances – will realise what a physical and yet transcendental effect improvisation has on the pianist. That sense of ecstasy is not only important to him when he is improvising, but also when he plays written music. He believes that composers such as Bach or Mozart, who were also renowned improvisers, experienced that ecstasy as well. 

Composing through improvisation and interest from musicologists 

A brief search in specialised databases of musicological literature reveals that Keith Jarrett has become a popular research subject. Titles such as “Body’n’Soul? Voice and Movement in Keith Jarrett’s Pianism”, “Anatomy of Groove: Pulse, Pattern, and Process in Keith Jarrett’s Sun Bear Concerts”, or “Keith Jarrett, Miscegenation & the Rise of the European Sensibility in Jazz in the 1970s” can be found in the major musicological academic journals, alongside articles on other great composers. If we consider the way Keith Jarrett improvises, we see that there are actually many parallels with composing. Certainly in long improvisations, Jarrett engages in a certain relationship with the musical material. That material may consist of a short melodic element, a certain chord progression, a rhythmic groove or even just a sound. Continually repeating and varying on the musical building blocks leads to a structure of recognisability and a musical form, which guide the listener through a process. You might say that as Jarrett plays, he shapes the music, discovers and explores the possibilities of the musical material, and makes connections in a heightened state of concentration (or ecstasy), as a composer does when setting music down in notation.

The result remains an improvisation, of course, but the musical logic is far from arbitrary or indifferent. Another typical characteristic of Jarrett’s music is his strong feeling for counterpoint. Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the most influential composers before him, and his playing style is infused with counterpoint. You especially notice that if you focus on the middle voices in his musical texture. Between the bass in the left hand and the melody in the right hand, he often creates a complex play of lines that drives the music forward. 

A cold winter evening in Cologne 

Back to that famous Friday evening in Cologne, then, on 24 January 1975. According to the many stories about that evening, the circumstances were far from ideal. Jarrett had arrived late in Cologne; he was exhausted from a long car drive and had hardly had time to eat. The big Bösendorfer piano he was supposed to play hadn’t turned up, so he had to make do with a smaller one that apparently wasn’t in great condition. The sound technician did set up the necessary microphones, but more with the intention of recording the performance as documentation than as a commercial album. Unfortunately there are no photos or images of that evening, so we don’t know for sure how accurate that anecdote is. What is certain is that his improvisation began with a small melodic unit that he started by repeating again and again, bringing clear unity to the several minutes of improvisation that followed. So this is definitely an example of an improvisation with the features of a composition. 

This made the recording especially popular when it was released, but it also led to growing interest in transcribing the music. Doing so would enable other pianists to bring the music back to life. That runs contrary to the idea of a spontaneous improvisation, and Keith Jarrett wasn’t initially keen on the project, but eventually he allowed it to go ahead. The result is a hefty score, carefully written out by Yuko Kishimi and Kunihiko Yamashita. Jarrett gave the project his blessing, but he specifically advised everyone to listen to the original recording above all. 

Improvisation on improvisation 

Thanks to the transcript, the music from The Köln Concert could be subjected to countless analyses and reinterpretations. It became a fully-fledged composition that also found its way into other musicians’ repertoire. The Japanese pianist Maki Namekawa is one such musician. Her interpretation will be combined with improvisations on Jarrett’s music by the French jazz pianist Thomas Enhco. Thus the original improvisation from 1975 becomes the starting point for a new improvisation on the musical ideas that emerged spontaneously at the time. With Keith Jarrett’s own seal of approval!