Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert (Kindle highlights)

Jarrett was extremely tired, having by his own account not slept for two days. (p. 6)
Considering the concert as an event beset by obstacles and setbacks suggests one intriguing idea about this recording: that it should never have happened. (p. 6)
Our auditory experience listening to Jarrett’s recording is not the same as the experience of the audience in that Cologne concert hall, or even the same as Jarrett’s experience. (p. 9)
The effect of singling out the Cologne performance is significant, because as Butterfield suggests, it imbues the performance with authority, implying that this one is more important than others given around the same time. (p. 10)
Live performance is usually seen in binary opposition to recorded performance; one is authentic and unmediated, the other artificial and highly mediated. (p. 10)
The Köln Concert is, in part, a document of the engagement between an American artist and a European audience. It serves as a microcosm of a much larger transatlantic dialogue, among musicians, audiences, critics, recording companies, journalists, and so on. (p. 11)
These solo recordings demonstrated an emerging conception of form in jazz. This was a post-songform conception, but at the same time it avoided the open-ended form often used in “new thing” jazz, and the highly structured compositions played by many of the fusion bands. (p. 11)
The development of Jarrett’s career as a solo pianist, and as an artist whose reputation came to be built in large part on his solo concert performances, was mainly as a result of the transatlantic nature of his career during this time. (p. 18)
These included at least two concerts in Sweden and one at the Molde Jazz Festival in Norway. There also seems to have been a solo performance in New York at some point in late 1972, which, according to Avakian (Jarrett’s manager at the time), was held at the Mercer Arts Center. (p. 20)
[...] seems to have played at the Alba Regia Jazz Festival in Hungary on June 3. (p. 20)
That places Jarrett’s performance some time between June 2 and June 4, 1972. Further confirmation comes from an unlikely source. In a travel article in the Oakland Tribune from August 1972 [...] (p. 20)
It also reveals what seems to have been a widespread lack of agreement on whether Jarrett should be considered a fusion musician or not. (p. 31)
For such musicians, the music they identified with during the 1960s was as likely to be by the Beatles and Bob Dylan as it was Miles Davis or John Coltrane. (p. 29)
Billboard’s notices on other Jarrett albums emphasized his reputation both as a consistent seller of jazz records and as someone with a crossover appeal to record buyers. These critical maneuvers served to establish Jarrett’s connections with jazz but also positioned him as eclectic. (p. 32)
In a piece on the 1973 Monterey Jazz Festival, Rolling Stone noted how young listeners seemed to be drawn to a range of jazz not confined to the fusion of groups such as Mahavishnu or Return to Forever, but including acts such as Jarrett, Sun Ra, Davis, Pharoah Sanders, and Tyner. (p. 39)
This and the liner notes outline an attitude to improvisation based on both spontaneous creation and the idea of a creative source external to the performer. (p. 42)
Jazz has usually been thought of as a group activity, born of the interaction between musicians in the moment of performance. The manner in which musicians interact while performing not only is an important stylistic component of jazz but can come to be part of a larger narrative of musical progress. Perhaps for this reason solo playing has been relegated to a footnote in jazz history, subservient to a narrative in which ensembles dominate. (p. 48)
But to invest in this stereotype is to forget that solo piano performance has been present right from the inception of jazz, particularly through the tales of the “ragging” pianists. (p. 48)
This link between the politically and culturally charged notion of freedom and musical practice has been a major theme in much recent scholarship on jazz from this period. (p. 51)
In this light the recordings by Jarrett, Bley, and Corea can all be seen in terms of a particular kind of approach to form. In this one respect they are remarkably consistent and demonstrate a distinctive post-1960s approach, one that is important in understanding The Köln Concert. (p. 57)
Taken together then, what do these examples from the Corea and Jarrett albums say about form? Both records contain a number of pieces with conventional cyclical forms, suggesting that the musicians were not entirely rejecting the postbop model of song form, and indeed were quite happy to work within that model. At the same time, many of the pieces on the albums suggested a new relationship between improviser and form, and a new way of conceptualizing composition. (p. 62)
Whereas a composer can choose to craft a piece in a variety of ways, not working in a linear fashion but shaping segments one at a time, and revising previously written material, an improviser is locked into a temporality in which material cannot be revised once it is played. (p. 65)
No improvisation can be truly complete or self-contained; it is instead part of an ongoing process. (p. 65)
Jarrett would undertake solo concert tours where he usually performed every other day, sometimes on consecutive nights. This kind of itinerary would give little time for him to rid himself of the memory of the previous performance. The fact that in an interview with journalist Peter Ruedi Jarrett alluded to listening to the tape of the Cologne performance just days after the concert also confirms that there was sometimes a process of reviewing recorded performances while on tour. (p. 66)
Does this mean that every time Jarrett plays a repetitive vamp passage he is stuck? One would think not, given the regularity with which they occur in his improvisations. (p. 76)
Whether or not Williams and the many other critics who have heard Jarrett’s groove passages this way are correct in their inference, such remarks indicate something important about how we listen to improvised music. When we listen, we are hearing not only the music but the improviser in the music. (p. 76)
Improvisers, he says, seek to play not what they know but what they do not know. (p. 76)
Perhaps it is the case that a quality of liveness emerges from the recording as a result of how listeners are inclined to share in this temporality with the improviser, to hear the music as it is being created and to understand it as such. It is not just that the music is improvised but that it sounds improvised. (p. 79)
Even though the record is a material artifact that allows us to listen to a performance again and again, the fact that we are hearing an improvisation imbues the recording with an immediacy that works against the banality of repetition. (p. 81)
Termini views the vocalizations as allowing the potential to hear when Jarrett is inspired or frustrated, or indeed finds something amusing. (p. 82)
The story has it that Jarrett was imitating the pre-concert bell at the Cologne Opera House, and that the audience can be heard laughing. (p. 82)
There is a considerable amount of reverberation added to the recording. Though a certain amount comes from the hall itself, given that by Martin Wieland’s account only two microphones were used to record the piano, relatively little of the hall’s acoustic would have been captured; most of the reverberation would have been added in the studio. (p. 88)
These vocalizations are sometimes parallel to, and in tune with, the musical line, while at other times they are parallel but out of tune. Vocalizing along with lines like this has an important effect: not only does it help convey for the listener the physical effort involved in improvising, but it also makes an implicit association with singing. (p. 88)
Singing along helps us hear the creation of these lines as an embodied act of performance that involves not just fingers on keys but the idea that those fingers are part of a performing body. (p. 88)
These sung, but unsingable, lines are highly expressive, imbued with the physical agency of the voice and also ecstatic in the sense that they are impossible. (p. 88)
The “whoos” Jarrett can be heard uttering at this point certainly serve, allied to the bombastic piano style of this particular passage, as an expression of joy. (p. 89)
This sense of non intention is contributed to by Jarrett’s seeming to stumble onto this A major chord, and then after hearing it, repeating it again and again. What seems like a fairly arbitrary musical idea, simply one of a series of chords in this passage, suddenly becomes something quite different and highly significant. (p. 100)
Tesser’s review serves to confirm that Jarrett’s music was heard, by some listeners, in terms of a non-Western aesthetic. A certain kind of musical stasis, executed by means of harmonically immobile vamp passages, was part of a more general cultural potential music could possess to evoke altered states of consciousness. (p. 104)
Pedal noise is a device he uses deliberately elsewhere. In this case the noise is not of a sufficient volume to be audible above the notes, but it functions in auditory terms almost like a bass drum, placed low in the mix, articulating the four beats of the meter. It is also placed slightly ahead of the beat, having the effect of propelling the music by anticipating the beat. (p. 109)
This kind of binary opposition is deeply flawed, not least because many improvisers prepare for what they do, and many composers create musical fragments or even whole pieces with the same speed as improvisers. But the fact remains that these two labels hold much power in influencing the value we assign to a piece of music. (p. 127)
To hear “Part IIc” as an improvisation is to acknowledge the possibility that an improviser such as Jarrett can spontaneously create something that sounds like a song form, which of course it is. (p. 127)
Writing in 1979, critic Jim Aikin suggested that in his experience of sitting in a Jarrett sound check and hearing the following concert performance, there were definite similarities: “He has ideas in the afternoon, or in the middle of the night … and he stores them at the back of this mind and hauls them out the next time he’s sitting at the piano. (p. 127)
This reinforces one of the arguments of this book: the solo concerts can be understood as a series of self-contained pieces, which also function as parts of large-scale improvisations. (p. 128)
A more productive way of considering this relationship is to think of composition and improvisation as existing at the ends of a continuum. (p. 129)
The fact that Jarrett reuses material between performances does not mean this is not improvised music, nor that Jarrett is composing pieces he then uses in these improvisations. Rather, this emphasizes the essentially dialogic relationship between these two creative processes. (p. 129)
I have been keen to suggest that this record came to stand for something, to function in variety of ways as a symbol of an idealized spontaneous creativity, an acoustic music free from the trappings of electronics. We can see at this point how those conceptions can become something rather different. The use of the record as background music emphasizes its potential functionality. The recording itself is not so important; more significant are the opportunities it affords its listeners. (p. 141)
The Köln Concert sits on a kind of aesthetic faultline. On the one side, its invocation of the improvisatory ideal places it within a jazz tradition that valorizes the importance of the spontaneous performance over the methodical and carefully rehearsed approach, even at the risk of idealizing this aesthetic to the point of distortion. But on the other, the history of the record’s associations in the 1970s as a “coffee table” item, relegating it to the status of background music, and then in some of the usages discussed previously, suggests that it is something jazz records are not expected to be. (p. 141)
As the case of The Köln Concert demonstrates, records have their own complex histories, which start at the moment of their inception but which continue onward and outward, navigating complex cultural avenues. (p. 142)