Keith Jarrett

CD version. On 24 January 1975 Keith Jarrett sat down at the piano of the Cologne Opera House late at night and improvised a concert of about an hour. Released by ECM that November, The Köln Concert became the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best-selling piano record of all. Fifty years later the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

Jarrett was 29, a veteran of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the Charles Lloyd Quartet and the Miles Davis band. With Manfred Eicher he had already made the studio solo album Facing You (1971) and the triple LP Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne (1973). The concert was organised by the teenage promoter Vera Brandes. The concert grand Jarrett had asked for never reached the stage, so he played a small, worn Bösendorfer meant for rehearsals. Eicher produced, and Martin Wieland recorded the concert live in the hall.

The two long improvisations grow from simple, insistent figures. In Part I Jarrett holds a two-chord vamp for minutes at a time. He moves between hymn-like rubato, blues and a gospel pulse while new melodies form above the rolling left hand. Part II opens on a driving groove close to a stomp, with broad chordal voicings that recall the Russian Romantics. It then thins out over its length until it reaches a pianissimo close. The short Part II c works as an encore, a single lyrical song with a clear melody.

Reviewers heard a synthesis rather than a collage. In Rolling Stone (1975) Robert Palmer wrote that the music "penetrates deeply into the trance-inducing areas pioneered by Terry Riley and La Monte Young". Down Beat (1976) called the concert "the pinnacle of his solo art". Later critics returned to the record's refusal to sit in one genre, heard as jazz by some and as something else by others. In 2025 the story of the night reached the cinema with Ido Fluk's film Köln 75, told from Brandes's side.

This CD edition of ECM 1064/65, first issued in 1975 as a double LP, holds the complete concert in its four parts on a single disc.