Music

For a lot of years, Vera Brandes couldn’t listen. Not once had she heard the bestselling solo jazz album of all time—Keith Jarrett’s passionate and sublime The Köln Concert—though she’d been essential to making it happen in 1975 as an 18-year-old music promoter in Cologne, West Germany.

It wasn’t the first show organized by the teenage music fanatic, but it was her most challenging, and almost didn’t happen at all. “It was such a traumatizing situation for me that night that I never listened to the record,” says Brandes, whose real-life struggle to make the concert happen is the subject of an engaging new film, Köln 75.

When Jarrett, then 29, arrived at the Cologne Opera House to perform on January 24, 1975, he hadn’t slept in 24 hours and was dealing with serious back pain. Even worse, the magnificent Bösendorfer Concert Grand 290 Imperial piano he’d requested was not waiting for him. Instead, he was provided an out-of-tune baby grand with a broken pedal.

By then Jarrett was already an acclaimed jazz player who had recorded with Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and many others. But his European solo tour was a low-budget operation, and he was traveling by car from city to city, aggravating his back issues. When he saw the piano in Cologne (Köln in German), he initially refused to play the concert.

The scramble of Vera (played by Mala Emde) and her young team to salvage the night—and convince Jarrett to perform—is the story told by the alternately playful and dramatic Köln 75, written and directed by Ido Fluk. The bilingual English and German language movie follows the desperate search for a suitable instrument, with the help of two heroic piano tuners, and the overflowing passions of a young woman putting on a show. 

Köln 75 debuted October 17 in New York, and opens October 24 in Los Angeles and Houston, and several other cities through December. (See zeitgeistfilms.com/film/koeln-75.)

The real-word result of that crisis was a hugely successful live album, recorded by the Munich-based label ECM Records, released as the 4 million-selling The Köln Concert. The hour-long record was pure improvisation and deeply rhythmic, with elements of classical and American gospel. Because of his substandard rehearsal piano, Jarrett focused on the instrument’s middle-register, and created spontaneous melody in a flow of inspiration.

The resulting music touched a popular nerve, and its immediate pleasures provided a doorway to jazz for new listeners, much like other top-selling recordings, like Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.

Brandes didn’t hear the record until many years later, when it came on at a lemonade stand while on vacation with some friends on the Spanish island of Formentera. “All of a sudden I hear this music, and I said, ‘Shit, I know this from somewhere,’” she recalls with a smile, on a video call. “Then I realized this was the album. And from that moment on, it started to haunt me.”

It has also haunted the pianist who made it. Jarrett, now 80, has grown increasingly frustrated by the outsized notoriety the album has had in his career. Jarrett and ECM weren’t involved in the movie, and did not allow the Köln recording to be used.

Fluk was previously aware of the Köln album, but knew nothing of the drama behind the scenes until he read a short magazine article about the substandard piano used and Brandes’s role. “I thought, what an incredible story about every piece of art ever made—like how important it is to face obstacles and how that makes art better,” says Fluk, calling from his home in Brooklyn.

Once he began talking to Brandes, the filmmaker was pulled deeper into her backstory, from conflicts with her parents to the obstacles for a young woman in 1975 putting on such a large concert. Fluk spent eight hours interviewing Brandes about her story.

In preparation for Köln 75, Fluk immersed himself in German culture, learning the language, watching German films, and studying the music of the period. In the film, he also puts the concert in a larger musical context, not just within jazz, but the vibrant musical landscape of West Germany at the time.

“So much happened back then musically, like Kraftwerk coming from Düsseldorf, inventing electronic music,” says Fluk, who was born in Tel Aviv and grew up mostly in Paris and New York City. “Then you have all this psychedelic rock and Kraut rock, with Can and Neu! and protopunk happening there. You also, by the way, have David Bowie and Iggy Pop moving to Berlin.”

As a young music fan and concert promoter, Brandes was engaged in many sounds and genres. “The story we’re dealing with is a jazz concert, but it’s a punk rock story, and I think the character is a punk rock character,” Fluk says of Vera. “She just did not listen to anyone who told her what to do, and she just did whatever she wanted.”

At the invitation of British jazz musician Ronnie Scott, Brandes booked her first tour at age 16 and began her career in music. Soon she was putting on her own shows in Cologne. She wasn’t a neophyte when she brought Jarrett to town, but the 1,400-capacity Opera House was her largest venue yet.

It also represented a big financial risk. Among the many miracles along the way was that her mother unexpectedly provided the 10,000 Deutsche Marks needed to rent the hall. Vera had to agree to leave the music business if she couldn’t pay back the loan. 

Though she had once dreamt of being a jazz singer herself, Brandes embraced the role of concert promoter. The mid-’70s was an exciting time to be engaging with art, music, and politics, she says.

“It was such a cultural explosion that was going on, and there was no separation of the arts and no separation of age groups,” she remembers. “We were all in this together as so many things went on politically—the peace movement, the anti-atomic power movement, and women’s liberation. You know, ’75 was the international year of the woman. Everything was going on at the same time.” 

At the beginning of the movie’s production, Brandes was welcome on the set, and she was curious to watch it come together. The day before shooting began, she made an encouraging speech to the cast and crew that Fluk says “gave everyone a sense of mission.” Then, the first day with cameras rolling focused on the family conflicts between Brandes and her parents, in particular, her disapproving father.

In the scene, young Vera is quietly returning home late at night, slowly coming up the stairs with her boots off, when the light goes on, and her father confronts her in German: “I can smell cigarettes. I’m talking to you, young lady! Like a whore, coming home in the middle of the night … You went to that jazz club, didn’t you?”

Watching the actors bring her memories to life was too much. “I saw them redo the scene a few times, and I realized I had to leave because my mirror neurons were dancing the polka,” she says. “All the fear that my whole early part of life was associated with came up crawling through the soles of my feet. And I just couldn’t stand watching it.”

The struggle of Brandes to make the concert happen is the heart of the film, but it also spends significant time with Jarrett on the road, leading to his troubled physical state on the night of the concert. Köln 75 offers a deeply empathetic portrayal of the pianist, as played by John Magaro.

“He was clearly under an enormous amount of stress. He was rather shy. He was not a friendly creature,” Brandes recalls.

Jarrett adapted to the circumstances, and improvised his way to the creation of the most popular album of his career. As time went on, Jarrett grew less interested in talking about the concert. While the album has never been taken off the market, and has been reissued in different editions and formats multiple times (including a new 50th anniversary edition), Jarrett has often dismissed it entirely. 

Jarrett, who can no longer perform after suffering two strokes in 2018, was not interested in participating in the film.

Fluk says he understands Jarrett’s feelings, and he compares the Köln record to Radiohead’s early hit “Creep.” For a time, the British rock band expressed a similar resentment toward the early hit song as they pursued more challenging work, but have become a lot more relaxed about it in recent years. Jarrett seems only less inclined to celebrate it.

“Musically speaking, I think he has better concerts, better live recordings, but everyone wants to just speak about this concert, and the record sold so much more than anything else,” says the director. “I understand that for him, this has become kind of like an albatross. I respect that.”

That said, Fluk wasn’t going to allow Jarrett’s disinterest get in the way of telling Brandes’s story. 

“She was never really given the credit that she deserves,” Fluk says. “We live in a time where there’s a lot of music movies being made, and they all focus on the artist, and they all almost tell the same story, just with a different soundtrack. That’s fine, and I enjoy those. But I thought, here’s an opportunity to focus the spotlight on someone we usually don’t see. There’s so many invisible people in making movies, in making music, and in the entire artistic endeavor. 

“The Cologne concert is the spark that happens when two great improvisers meet. One’s great at improvising on the keys, the other’s great at improvising at life. And I was not going to let anyone tell me I’m not able to make a film about this woman.”

After the Cologne concert, Brandes continued promoting concerts in Germany, and founded her first record label, CMP, in 1977. There were more labels in Europe and the U.S., including Intuition Records, which became Blue Note’s world music sister label. Since 2000, she has been focused on the use of music in alternative medicine. 

Brandes has had very little contact with Jarrett in the years after their famous concert, and her few experiences mirrored the pianist’s increasingly negative attitude about the Köln album. A few years after the Cologne concert, Jarrett was playing in a nearby town with his quartet. Brandes met him there. 

“I took him after the concert from the venue to his hotel, and we had a very friendly conversation,” she recalls. “We even had dinner together, but that was it.”

About 10 years ago, she saw him again at a show in Toronto, and Jarrett didn’t even shake her hand. And then, shortly before his strokes in 2018, Brandes was invited backstage at a show in Vienna, where she again extended her hand to say hello. “He didn’t take it,” she says. “He was a little obnoxious. He said, ‘Oh, they’re telling me you are the woman with the piano in Cologne.’ It was crystal clear he had absolutely no interest in talking to me, so I said goodbye.”

Regardless, their names will now be linked forever with the release of Köln 75. Brandes has seen the film several times at premieres and festivals, but plans to soon put it aside.

“I’m trying to keep the original memory as much as I can, which is why I probably don’t want to see it a lot more,” Brandes says, though she hopes a new generation watches. “It’s such a positive movie, telling people there is just absolutely nothing that cannot be done. That’s a spirit that is so important.”