“Köln 75”: Keith Jarrett’s legendary album becomes a movie
“Köln 75” shows that the most conventional of musical stories can be told – the one dedicated to the birth of a masterpiece, in this case the legendary “Köln Concert” by Keith Jarrett – breaking all the expectations with A seductive approach and a very high rhythm. Just choose a different point of view and not make lessons to your audience, but excite it.
For this reason, Ido river film presented to Berlinal number 75 does not open in Germany, but in the Vatican state, remembering how Michelangelo painted for years lying on those wooden scaffolding the vault of the Sistine. Impalcatures that were completed by work disappeared, but which were part of the system that allowed him to complete his greatest masterpiece. Seven hundred miles and six hundred years later, for Request the recording of a concert that turned into one of the most loved jazz albums ever, The role of the invisible impaling with the result concluded remains crucial.
“Köln 75” tells the most unlikely human scaffolding possible Behind a record of this stature: a girl not even twenty years old, rebellious, scapeman, whose best quality is that nobody, absolutely nobody can tell her no, who will be able to make a concert possible that until a few minutes earlier was about to be canceled.
The true story told by the film with an energy attitude and irresistible enthusiasm is incredible, in the literal sense of the word, because it comes from a musical world that seems alien today, imponderable. The one in which the very young Vera Brandes He feels asking for a jazz musician on tour in the city if he wants to organize a tour in Europe.
He just saw her climbing an infinite tail of people to bring him a ice cream cone, because in fact he has just performed in a ice cream shop, despite being a well -known artist.
We are in the 70s and jazz as a musical genre almost died in terms of popularity in the United States. Instead in Europe it still has traction and in Germany It’s all about jazzfor a while. As The most important artists of the US scene arrive en masse in the old continent to perform. Incredible occasions are created for European spectators and admirers in theory geographically away from their idols.
Vera accepts the musician’s challenge and from the paternal dental office he suddenly manages and starts a real job, Bringing big names of the genre to Germany, while still going to school and not having any type of experience, license, training. He does it because he can, because he has a rebellious soul, to contrast his father who sees the fact that his daughter does not activate to become a dentist like him as smoke in the eyes or at least to join the role of woman at home, wife and mother.
AND A rebellious and lively musical world that told by “Köln 75”, in which the business has not yet taken over. Not in old Europe, at least, explains Keith Jarrett (John Mangaro) to the journalist Michael Watts (Michael Chernus). For this people like him are willing to do tours that aspire to nothing more than to survive until the next stopasking for a refund of airline tickets sent by the organizers and then traveling by car and saving, eating and sleeping in luck. In his second part the film focuses on why Jarrett lends himself to this massacred experience.
It is not in an easy time of his life, at the level of health: he turns with a brace on his back, sleeps and eats very little.
He and his manager are acutely aware that this tour leads to people.A talent for music as they see one in generation And, as the music industry is changing, it is not said that the next genius will be recognized and appreciated. The same Jarrett is persecuted by his association with Miles Davis: “They will write it on my tomb, who was the pianist of Miles Davis”, a role to which he had said twice no, before accepting.
From the partnership with Davis Jazz went on and Jarrett is trying to bring him further, As the film explains to us by breaking the fourth wall with a very funny information sequence. From large to small bands, from jazz tried to free jazz to improvisation. Finally Jarrett, only on a stage for an hour, every evening: Only him and a plan, no repetitions, no starting points. Only an superhuman ability to empty the mind and bring out the music also from the air around him and his piano.
True, in its conquests and in its mistakes, It will be that impaling that will support Jarrett, but also the one that will put it in difficulty. It is she who with her legendary stubbornness and first insistence will be able to guarantee him the stage of the Opera di Cologne and then to send sold out a room of over a thousand and three hundred places for an absolutely experimental and niche concert. However, it is always she who welcomes it with a wrong floor on stage, forgotten, with a broken pedal and not suitable for projecting the sound in such a large space, giving way to a gigantic floor hunt and the aging more to heart -pounded ever seen At the cinema.
It is the ability and will of both of spend they are in order to music, without quantifying their personal and economic profit on the other course of the scale, To shape the piece of music history that the film tells. Patience if at the end he romance a little too much, sliding slightly in the conventional: the same story of the concert is legendary and books, podcasts, and infinite reconstructions have been dedicated to her. After such an attractive film, you feel in the mood to forgive everything.
“Köln 75” is a film that celebrates rebellion against a system of values that – inside and outside the music – puts convenience and money in first positionat the expense of talent, art, of the joy of doing something important. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, after Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon”, this is the second musical film of this Berlinal focused on this issue, which brings with it this warning.
