Play the Unplayable
EPISODE 044: PLAY THE UNPLAYABLE
On January 24, 1975, American Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett sat down at a piano in Cologne, Germany, and recorded the best-selling solo album in jazz history. Not much of a story. But when you learn he improvised the whole thing on an unplayable piano, it becomes an astonishing lesson in showing up and in making art not despite our limitations but because of them. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
On January 24, 1975, American Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett sat down at a piano in Cologne, Germany, and recorded the best-selling solo album in jazz history. For an accomplished musician with astonishing talent even as a child, and a man already playing with the likes of Miles Davis by the time he was 25, this might come as no surprise. It might even be expected. But the Cologne Concert was nothing anyone could have expected. There’s no real story in an exceptional person doing an exceptional thing, and the story of the Keith Jarrett concert in Cologne is a great story I’m David duChemin, and this is episode 044 of A Beautiful Anarchy. Let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
When Keith Jarrett arrived at the Cologne Opera House on January 24th, only hours before his concert, he was exhausted and, having made the decision not to fly but to drive the nearly 600km from Zurich in an old Peugeot, his back was killing him. On arrival he was met by Vera Brandes, the concert promoter who was only 17 years old, but having managed to convince the Opera House to hold its first jazz concert ever she had gone on to sell out all 1400 seats, which probably says more about Jarrett’s popularity than anything, but that she had the guts to do it all still makes me shake my head. At 17 I barely knew how to buy a concert ticket, but in a few minutes Vera was going to need every bit of that courage.
When Vera walked Keith Jarrett onto the stage for the first time that evening, before the show, it would have been immediately clear that something was wrong. As part of his technical rider he’d asked for a very specific piano, a Bosendorfer 290 Imperial Grand piano. What he got through some confusion and miscommunication with the crew at the opera house was a much smaller Bosendorfer, a baby grand they used only for rehearsals and never intended to fill the concert hall with sound. That was only the beginning of the problems with that piano. The upper and lower octaves didn’t work the way they should, neither did the black keys or the pedals. And it was terribly out of tune. It was unplayable and Keith told his young promoter as much. Then he told her he wouldn’t be playing that evening and left.
I imagine Vera Brandes still has nightmare about this. To her credit she fought like hell to make it work. When she discovered that a sister concert hall across town had the piano Jarrett had asked for she recruited friends and made plans to push it through the rainy streets, only to be told this would make that piano equally unplayable and would ruin it. Out at Jarrett’s car she hunched over, soaking wet, and begged him not to leave. To his credit, Jarrett relented.
The piano tuner had his work cut out for him, and Jarrett went to dinner at an Italian restaurant that managed to lose his order, bringing his meal only minutes before Jarrett had to leave and head back to the concert hall, now not only exhausted and in pain, but hungry. I’m not remotely a musician, but I’m guessing with all the shit Jarrett was dealing with he could have been forgiven for sitting down at his crappy piano that night, pulling out his sheet music, and powering through things, grateful just to get it over with and mail it in.
So now’s probably as good a time as any to tell you that Keith Jarrett had no music, and though that part was planned, the music he would play was not. This concert was one in a series of European appearances in which Jarrett improvised the whole thing. The final recording of the Cologne concert is 67 minutes long and not a single note of it was planned.
Before Keith Jarrett finally took the stage that night, he sent his recording engineer home, but at the last minute they decided the mics were already set up and they might as well record the disaster. Keith walked on stage, sat down at the small piano, still not remotely fully functional but those keys that did work were at least in tune, and he played his heart out. Far from being a disaster, the concert was unforgettably magical. The recording that was released later that year has since sold more than 3.5 million copies.
As I wrote this episode I was listening to the Cologne Concert, over and over again, and trying to put myself in Jarrett’s shoes which is speculative at best but what even my untrained ears hear is a man who showed up with everything he had because he couldn’t rely on anything else. He couldn’t let the extraordinary piano create the magic, because it wasn’t extraordinary, it was a piece of shit and he had to work hard to coax anything out of it, working around the notes that wouldn’t play, and playing through the exhaustion, the pain, the hunger, and somehow still having the mental and physical resources to improvise every aspect of his performance. At the end of that performance the applause goes on and on.
In thinking about all this it feels obvious to point out what extraordinary things can be accomplished by someone who has mastered their craft, someone who is, as Steve Martin put it, so good they can’t ignore you. It’s tempting to observe how someone with that kind of skill can show up and create magic despite the circumstances and the tools. But I think it’s something more. I think the Cologne Concert was the magic it was because of, and not despite the circumstances. Having nothing else to lean on, Keith Jarrett embraced his constraints, and drew on the deepest resources he had. The unusual, shall we say “qualities" of the piano that night forced him to play in a way no other piano would have, and suggested musical variations he might never otherwise have considered. The small size of the piano demanded he play with a power he might not have, had he been given the grand piano he’d asked for. That night Keith Jarrett played with a determination and grit other nights had never required from him.
I’d never heard of Keith Jarret until last month when a listener named Dennis sent me a link to this story, and Dennis, if you’re listening, I owe you a debt of gratitude for the introduction. I’m at the beginning of my exploration of Jazz right now, so I immediately ordered the Cologne Concert, and have read everything I can find about that nearly disastrous night in 1975. I’ve wondered how that one evening might have changed Vera Brandes' life. It must have, right? To be 17 and experience that kind of determination and magic. I know she’s still in music. I know that night changed Jarrett’s life too, he’d been couch-surfing a year earlier and the concert in Cologne put his career on a different track. I don’t know much else. Like I said, I’m only beginning to learn about Jazz. But I do know the world is a more beautiful place because of that music.
And I know my own experiences. I’ve performed and lectured when I was desperately sick, running off stage during applause breaks to mute my mic and vomit before going back to finish a show. Without exception the worse I felt the better the show was, because there’s no cruise control when you feel that bad. You have to pay attention and be present more completely than you might be on a normal night. Working with unfamiliar tools and uncomfortable circumstances forces you to play an A-game you wouldn’t otherwise play. A disruption to our scripts forces new ways of thinking. A broken tool demands new ways of working. And probably, on some level, the awareness of how close we are walking to the edge of failure, when things are not going to plan, makes us pay attention and focus our efforts in a way we just wouldn’t do otherwise. Having said that, I wonder, How often have I walked away from that edge? I wonder how many times I’ve allowed the possibility of magic to become an excuse not to show up at all because conditions weren’t perfect. Because I was more focused on the reasons things might not work out than I was on the chance to perform beyond what I imagined to be the limits of my abilities. How often have I looked at the very circumstances that would coax out the best of me and seen them as a reason not to try?
What I love most of all about the Cologne concert, aside from the fact that it happened at all and was recorded, and that the music itself is so beautiful–so transcendent–is that it points to one of the most important principles of everyday creativity: that perfect conditions are not a pre-requisite for our best work.
Actually, I think it’s more than that. I think our idea of what constitutes perfect conditions is just muddle-headed and wrong. Mine is. I want to show up for work and find the road cleared, free from obstacles. I don’t want complications, I don’t want to work through that sudden gut feeling that this whole thing is headed for the crapper. Or worse, the suspicion that of all the things getting in my way, the largest and most stubborn of them is me. What if the most perfect conditions for the making of extraordinary things are those in which things go wrong, put us off balance, and demand more from us? What if the conditions we see as a liability because they’re hard are the best assets we could have in the making of something that’s extraordinary?
Sure, there are days it all goes well and, I mean, really well. I don’t think we have to constantly stare down cataclysm, and I’m not arguing that what we all need is just more drama. But I am saying that a shift in the way we see that drama, not just in our art-making, but in everything in our lives, can change everything. How often have you felt like Keith Jarrett, exhausted and hungry and facing an unplayable piano, and thinking to hell with this. I think everyone of us has moments where we’re sitting in the car, out in the rain, about to put that concert hall in the rear-view mirror, when our muse, or our gut, comes to the window, looks us in the eye and says, “please, don’t give up.” And everything else inside us, our common sense and the fear of failure and our pride, all those other voices are arguing hard just to cut and run. After all, we did our part, right? We showed up, didn’t we? We weren’t the ones that put the unplayable piano on the stage.
Listening to Keith Jarrett playing that night I hear a voice reminding me that anyone can make art of one kind or another when it’s easy. Anyone can rise to the level of their skill and mail it in when conditions are perfect. It doesn’t take courage to go where we’re not afraid to go. I hear in Keith’s music a reminder that the best of what we make, and the best of who we are, comes–often very much to our own surprise–when we do what we think could not be done. When every voice in us is saying, I can't do this. When what’s in front of us, our tools and circumstances, are so patently unworkable that in order to make anything of them at all we’ve got to do more than just show up, we’ve got to lean so hard on those keys that the music gets to the back of the room, and to improvise not only with the music which was the plan all along but with the tools and the circumstances, and to focus our energies so acutely that there’s room for nothing else, most especially our excuses.
The best of our creative efforts do not happen when conditions are perfect, and I find that tremendously liberating because life is like that. Unpredictable. Imperfect. And, like Jarrett, I often find myself exhausted, sore, and hungry, and just wanting to call the whole thing off, so sure of disaster or just wanting to mail it in. But then I hear that first note on that shitty little piano and Jarrett reminds me that the magic can always be there, not in the right tools, not in the right circumstances or the right timing, but in the refusal to give up, and the determination to play the unplayable.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0