Köln 75

Köln 75
One Two Films / Extreme Emotions / Gretchenfilm / MMC Studios Köln GmbH
DIrector: Ido Fluk
2025

November, 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Köln Concert (ECM Records, 1975), the live recording by Keith Jarrett that stands as the biggest-selling solo album—and piano album—in jazz history. To mark the occasion cinematically, Köln 75 hit select U.S. movie screens in October, 2025. The film defies expectations and takes risks, almost as much as Jarrett did onstage at the Cologne Opera House on January 24, 1975.

Jarrett's album resonated with a wide swath of listeners, selling an extraordinary four million copies.The Köln Concert was a different kind of solo piano performance by a jazz musician. Before—and after—Jarrett's concert and album, solo jazz concerts tended to comprise either composed works, albeit with frequent improvisation within them, or fully improvised performances that sounded, well, fully improvised, like the freewheeling stylings of avant-piano giant Cecil Taylor and his artistic successors.)

With The Köln Concert—and in dozens of solo concerts since, plenty of them released as recordings—Jarrett did something different. He created a seamless improvised performance that, in large part, sounded composed. The results in Cologne, in contrast to the norm for free improvisation, tended to the melodic and soulful, even the spiritual. When a recording of the concert was released, those musical elements created a crossover hit, drawing in numerous album buyers who may have owned few, if any, other jazz titles.

If an anniversary film around the The Köln Concert was imagined, it might have been a documentary focused on the show itself or Jarrett's artistic path to the album.

Yet the storyline of Köln 75 has little to do with those musical themes. The film isn't a documentary, save for a few explanatory historical interludes (one of which errs in its false implication that Jarrett pioneered fully improvised solo performance in jazz.)

Instead—and surprisingly, Köln 75 is a narrative film, a fictional account of the concert's genesis based on the experiences of the young woman who presented it. Director and screenwriter Ido Fluk makes that focus clear just minutes in, with an interlude about the logistics required for Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, including constructing the elaborate scaffold on which the artist worked. Over images of the chapel, the narration clarifies that Köln 75 is not about Michelangelo or The Köln Concert. Rather, as the narration states, "it's about the scaffolding."

The unlikely scaffold builder is Vera Brandes, a clever and fearless teenaged "jazz bunny" (to quote the caption on her cheesecake photo in a trashy Cologne tabloid shown in the film). While ostensibly still attending school, Brandes quickly builds a concert promotion business that brings international artists like Ralph Towner to Europe, and takes her to the 1974 Berlin Jazz Days, where she experiences her first Jarrett solo performance.

The scene depicting that concert alternates between shots of the deeply expressive playing of the pianist, as portrayed by Jarrett lookalike John Magaro, and those of Mala Emde, as a moved and teary-eyed Vera.



It is a rare and revealingly tender moment amid a bravura performance, both funny and charming, in which Emde mostly portrays Brandes as "a courageous and confident young person," albeit one that was also "anxious and scared," as Brandes told All About Jazz.

The film's heart is the fast-paced portrayal of the run-up to the performance. Brandes is shown confronting obstacle after obstacle, from securing the large sum required to book the Opera House to skepticism (perhaps understandable) about the capability of a 17-year-old to actually pull off a show in a 1,300-seat hall.

With hours to showtime, Köln 75 switches to the subplot of Jarrett and his producer Manfred Eicher (Alexander Scheer). making their way to Cologne. Here, too, there are obstacles, including Jarrett's health and reluctance about performing.

A film that was less responsible and more melodramatic could easily have villainized Jarrett, making him a malevolent force against which Brandes and others are forced to battle. But with nuanced writing and direction from Fluk and a well-rounded performance by Magaro, the pianist emerges as a sympathetic, if temporarily troubled, soul.

First among those voices is the character Michael Watts, a rumpled jazz journalist deftly played by Michael Chernus (of TV's "Severance"). In his queries to Jarrett, Watts becomes a proxy for viewers who are seeking to better understand the pianist, including the demons that are plaguing him.

In addition to coaxing a reluctant Jarrett to reveal himself, Watts elicits insight from Eicher into the artist's legendary prickliness, apparent even then, about audiences who cough or otherwise distract him during playing. "To reach that level of playing, he needs to be hyperconcentrated, and yet relaxed," Eicher says, "every sound around him shapes the music. Every camera snap feels like a bat to the head."

The scenes en route to the concert lay the groundwork for a piano crisis at the Opera House, and a final, mesmerizing two-round confrontation between Brandes and an uncooperative Jarrett. Emde's performance here is a compelling blend of bravura and panic; Magaro's, of agonizing indecision, even as we, of course ,know the ultimate outcome.



Asked about the legacy of the famed album her event yielded, Brandes proclaims that, among other things, "without it, there would have been no New Age music." She then quickly, and ruefully, notes the snobbish reception for that genre, at least from music cognoscenti. She recalls promoting a tour by George Winston in the wake of The Köln Concert, and having to endure hearing the Windham Hill Records pianist dismissed as a "second-rate Keith Jarrett."

Indeed, the serenity and prettiness of Jarrett's hourlong improvisation in Cologne prompted some critics to dismiss it as less-than-authentic jazz. They have a point. Jarrett's solo oeuvre did not then—and does not even now—fit a tidy artistic category. As the Brandes character tells a skeptical radio DJ in the film, "it isn't jazz, it isn't any genre. It's music."

Sadly, the skeptics about The Koln Concert today include Jarrett himself, according to Brandes. She reports the pianist spoke disparagingly of the landmark performance when she last saw him. That was backstage after a 2016 Vienna concert that was one of Jarrett's last before he suffered several strokes in 2018.

Still, for all Jarrett's misgivings about The Köln Concert, Brandes still much admires him for his courage and persistence in creating the work.

Köln 75 makes clear that the struggle that produced the landmark performance was not only that of its performer. Indeed, the film might be one of the best cinematic tributes ever to those who create the platforms on which artists do their work.

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