There are recordings that exist because everything went wrong first.
January 24th, 1975. The Opera House in Cologne. Keith Jarrett arrives exhausted, having driven through the night from a concert in Zurich. The piano onstage — a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial that had been requested — has been swapped out for a small, tinny Bösendorfer 290 practice instrument, the wrong model entirely, with a broken sustain pedal in the lower register and keys that stick. Jarrett reportedly considers canceling. Producer Manfred Eicher of ECM, who had flown in for the event, talks him into going on. The 1,400-seat house is sold out.
What follows is one of the best-selling solo piano albums in history.
What the Bad Piano Made Him Do
Jarrett's usual approach — those vast, arching improvisations that draw on gospel, blues, folk melody, and European classical form — gets fundamentally reshaped by the instrument under his hands. Because the lower register is weak and muddy, he stays in the upper and middle registers. Because there's no sustain to lean on, he develops that insistent, rolling left-hand ostinato that drives Part I like a locomotive finding its rhythm. He hums audibly throughout, sometimes at the edge of a moan. It isn't affectation. The man is pulling music out of a broken machine through sheer physical will.
Engineer Martin Wieland recorded the concert on a mobile unit for WDR, the German public broadcaster. The sound is warm, slightly distant, exactly right — you hear the room breathe, the audience shift, the weight of the silence between phrases. Eicher would go on to become one of the most important producers in jazz, and his instinct here — to release the full concert essentially unedited, across four sides of vinyl — was a genuine act of courage for a label barely five years old.
The Music Itself
Part I is the one everyone knows, all twenty-six minutes of it, that opening figure cycling upward like a hymn being remembered from a dream. It builds and releases and builds again. There is a moment around the fourteen-minute mark where Jarrett lands on a chord so simple it almost embarrasses itself, and then he just stays there, letting it resolve slowly, the way a good sentence sometimes needs no second clause.
Parts IIa and IIb are more introspective, slower to arrive. Part IIc closes the concert with something closer to stride piano, almost playful, Jarrett finally loose after the effort of what came before.
The album was released by ECM in 1975 and within a few years had sold over three million copies — an almost absurd figure for an improvised solo piano record on a European jazz label. None of that success was manufactured. People passed it to each other the way you pass along something that changed the way you heard silence.
I came back to it last winter after years away. Put it on after ten o'clock, room mostly dark. My wife asked what it was from the other room. That's still the best review I can offer.