Keith Jarret, The Köhln Concert

In 1924, jazzband director Paul Whiteman conducted the premiere of a composition he had requested from George Gerswhin and which was intended to link jazz with classical music. The released piece was Rhapsody in Blue. Twenty-five years later, already retired from the stage, and perhaps sure that he would never again establish relationships with a top-ranking musician, Whiteman had to welcome – in his role as a TV host in a show promoting young talents – a five-year-old boy who played the piano leaving the audience astounded.

Boulanger's invitation
The boy's name was Keith Jarret and he had started studying piano two years earlier. Some time after his first formal performance at age seven playing Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Saint-Saens, an invitation was issued to him. He was invited to Paris to continue studies with the most important music pedagogue of the time, Nadia Boulanger, who had taught Daniel Barenboim and Dinu Lipatti to play the piano, to name just two of his talented students. Keith's mother was delighted with the news, but the adolescent Jarret was beginning to feel more inclined to jazz than to the classics, so he respectfully declined the invitation.

A great improviser
This is how, at twenty years old, we have Keith enjoying life and music in clubs in Boston and New York, in his role as a cocktail pianist. In the latter city, he joined a jazz group and soon after recorded his first compositions. Despite being part of numerous jazz trios and quartets in the seventies, it is also the time when he began to perform alone, just him, his music and his piano. In 1975, a very young seventeen-year-old German businesswoman encouraged him to give a concert with a "repertoire" consisting exclusively of improvisations.

The Köhln Concert
The concert was held at the Köhln Opera House on January 24, with the venue packed with enthusiastic audiences. Almost as enthusiastic as Keith, who at that time gave remarkable samples of his brand, accompanied by murmurs, foot taps on the floor and movements around the bench; as well as his extraordinary ability to improvise, of which it will suffice to note that in this Part I of the concert the pianist stays for twelve minutes improvising on the basis of only two chords: G major and A minor. Then, it takes a breather and "expands" its harmonic base by adding one more chord: A major.

The improvisation, one hour and ten minutes, was recorded in its entirety, and it became, until today, one of the best-selling records of solo piano music in history. A few years ago, and after persistent challenge, Jarret finally agreed to make a transcription of what he played in Cologne and publish it, but with the compulsory advice that what was heard that night has the last word.