The Köln Concert

above: the Cologne Opera House (photo credit)

this week in history: a landmark recording

“If you don’t know Keith Jarrett’s music, then you don’t know music.”
- YouTube music authority Rick Beato

On 1975-01-24, the American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett gave a concert at the Opera House in Cologne, West Germany. A capacity crowd of 1400+ was treated to a spellbinding performance; for the rest of us, the concert was recorded and released on ECM Records as The Köln Concert. The performance was completely improvised; that is, there was no pre-composed music.

The concert became a phenomenal commercial and critical success and propelled Jarrett into international stardom. But it almost didn’t happen.

what could go wrong?

above: Dr. Vera Brandes (photo credit)

The concert promoter was a 17-year old high school student, Vera Brandes of Cologne. She had scheduled the concert for 11:30pm on a Friday night, after the regular opera production was over.
Jarrett had played in Zurich the night before and decided to cash in his plane ticket and rent a car to drive to Cologne, apparently unaware that this would be an exhausting six hour drive through snowy mountain roads in a tiny Renault 4 subcompact. Jarrett was wearing a back brace at the time and arrived in Cologne exhausted and in pain.
Jarrett had requested a Bosendorfer 290 “Imperial”, a colossal nine-and-a-half foot, 97-key grand piano. Ms. Brandes assured him that the Opera House already had one, but this was incorrect; the only piano in the hall was a baby grand piano in a rehearsal room. The piano was woefully out of tune, the sostenuto pedal didn’t work at all, it sounded terrible, and due to its small size, the piano simply wasn’t loud enough for a concert hall.
Because of freezing rain in Cologne that afternoon, the piano moving companies were unwilling to send their drivers out to deliver another piano to the concert hall. It was going to be the broken-down piano or nothing.

Never forget. Only for you.

Jarrett decided against performing and walked out into the rain to catch a cab to his hotel. Brandes was unable to give refunds for the show and had to convince him to play, so she ran out into the cold after him and begged. Moved with pity, Jarrett finally agreed to perform, telling the teenager “never forget. Only for you.” The concert was on. Maybe.

While a crew of technicians feverishly worked on tuning and repairing the piano, Jarrett went out to an Italian restaurant across the street from the opera house, but had to wait and wait for service. By the time his food arrived, it was already time for him to return to the opera house and prepare for the show.

the signal bell

“The minute he played the first note, everybody knew this was magic.”
- Vera Brandes, promoter

The Opera House had a signal bell, a cadence of five chimes that inform patrons to take their seat. The crowd entered the auditorium and Jarrett was half falling asleep as he walked out onto the stage. He sat down at the piano and played the five note sequence of the signal bell. Then he developed that same musical idea a bit further … and he built a 26-minute improvisation around that motif.

The sustain pedal didn’t work, so Jarrett played extended ostinato figures in his left hand. The upper register sounded tinny and the bass was weak, so he stayed in the middle two octaves of the piano. And he had to play the piano as loudly as possible in order to get this underpowered piano’s sound to reach the back of the concert hall. He was standing at the piano, exhausted and in pain, but forcing the piano to accede to his will. The audience simply couldn’t believe what they were hearing.

The show proved to be a rousing success, and ECM records released the recording later that year. It went on to become one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time.

the morale of the story

“Because he could not fall in love with the sound of [the piano], he found another way to get the most out of it.”
- Manfred Eicher, founder ECM Records

The Köln Concert has spawned all kinds of TED talks, books, NPR and BBC documentaries, etc. over the years, and it’s easy to see the enduring appeal of the story. There are a lot of ways to interpret the morale of the story: you could turn it into a modern day parable about pushing through impossible odds, or about the rewards of finding the “good” qualities in a “bad” piano, etc. Economist Tim Harford gave a TED talk about adversity as a catalyst for creativity, and focuses on the Koln Concert as a case study.

Perhaps the best lesson: Vera Brandes needed Keith Jarrett to play that show a lot more than Keith Jarrett needed to play it. But when he saw a crisis brewing around him, he was engaged with the crisis and ready to find a solution.

where are they now?

Vera Brandes had a long and successful career as a music producer, record label owner, publisher and researcher. She currently works as the Director of the Research Program for Music and Medicine at Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg, Austria.

Keith Jarrett enjoyed a five-decade career that spanned jazz, classical and other genres. He is still alive in 2025 but was slowed by a series of strokes that he sustained in 2018 and no longer tours or records.

The “unplayable piano” from the concert still sits in the lobby of the Cologne Opera House.