How a German teenager pulled off jazz’s most legendary gig

{"text":[[{"start":6.55,"text":"One snowy night in January 1975, Vera Brandes, an 18-year-old German music promoter, looked out of a window into the parking lot of Cologne’s opera house and saw something appalling. Two hours before he was due to step on stage, the 29-year-old pianist Keith Jarrett was poised to drive away, skipping the sellout gig she had organised — and of which he was the star. "}],[{"start":30.45,"text":"One can understand why. Jarrett had been presented at the sound check with a rehearsal piano that was out of tune and with sticking keys. The piano tuner was on his way, but Jarrett was not convinced they would arrive in time. Plus, the musician had back problems and hadn’t slept the night before, in part because he’d been ferried from gig to gig in a tiny Renault 4 during a far-from-glamorous European tour. "}],[{"start":54.95,"text":"The gig that Jarrett would eventually play would make jazz history: the recording of it, The Köln Concert, went on to sell more than 4mn copies, becoming the best-selling solo jazz record of all time. The story of how Brandes pulled it off is now the subject of Ido Fluk’s lovely new film Köln 75."}],[{"start":75.75,"text":"So how did she talk him down that night? Over video call from Kalamata, Greece, Brandes explains what happened next. “My idea was that the only person that Keith would listen to in a situation like this is Miles [Davis]."}],[{"start":89.3,"text":"“So I spoke to him the same way. I said” — Brandes’s voice goes down an octave as she imitates the gravel-voiced trumpeter — “‘Keith, if you don’t play tonight, I’m going to be truly fucked. And I know you’re going to be truly fucked too.’ And I stared at him and he stared at me and nobody dared to blink. After what felt like an endless stretch of minutes he said, in the same Miles Davis voice, ‘OK, I play, but never forget, just for you’.”"}],[{"start":117.44999999999999,"text":"Why did Jarrett change his mind? Köln 75’s director Fluk has an idea. “I strongly believe that that’s because a spark was created when he met, where he crashed into the mess, the whirlwind, the punk rock aura of Vera Brandes.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":133.6,"text":"Fluk’s film is being promoted on the strength of Jarrett’s virtuosic, entirely improvised performance, but it isn’t chiefly about that: it’s really about one woman’s bravura struggle against, frankly, a lot of men, including the great pianist himself. For a start, we never hear a note of what Jarrett played that night; there’s more Krautrock on the soundtrack than jazz. "}],[{"start":156.6,"text":"The director was aware “from the get-go” that Jarrett wouldn’t sanction a celebratory biopic. The gig is not, to put it mildly, his favourite. “It was a moment in time and I had the wrong piano and I don’t exactly like my actual touch, my dynamics at all,” the musician told Jazzwise magazine last year."}],[{"start":175.65,"text":"But Jarrett’s refusal to give the project his blessing was not going to stop Fluk from making the film. “I thought, this is my broken piano,” he says. “You know, perfection is boring. What makes art interesting are the mistakes, the imperfections, the ways that we as artists try and resolve or solve these problems, these Rubicons, these obstructions. I tried to make, not a film about jazz, but a film that was jazz.”"}],[{"start":203,"text":"Powering Fluk’s film along is Brandes, an unflappable ball of energy finding her way in conservative 1970s West Germany. It was from her mother’s side of the family that the teenage Brandes got the money and chutzpah to set herself up in the music business. Her maternal grandmother did something similar two generations earlier, setting up a false teeth business in Cologne aged 18 that became the biggest of its kind in Germany. Before Brandes was out of her teens, she was among Germany’s leading jazz promoters and managed a record label."}],[{"start":236.65,"text":"The film compellingly depicts this plucky teenager standing up to male jazz egos. There’s a terrific scene when she tells the British saxophonist and club owner Ronnie Scott that he should get a new drummer. “I was right, but where did that come from?” she asks. “Instinct. Maybe from my mother and grandmother.” So what would you counsel young women trying to get into the business now? Is it as misogynistic now as it was then? Brandes pauses before replying. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” she says slowly. “Yeah, of course, not much change.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

• Keith Jarrett leans forward intently while playing a Kawai grand piano during a concert performance.
• A man at a grand piano is illuminated by a spotlight on stage, with an applauding audience in the background.

"}],[{"start":268,"text":"Brandes quit the music business a few years ago, after a very successful career. Why? “Digital formats were taking over the record industry, which was giving away entire repertoires to companies like Apple with a completely idiotic accounting system in the background, which would never, ever allow for the artists to get properly remunerated for their rights. The whole industry thought that digital would be the biggest portion of whipped cream on top of the cake that they would continue to be eating until the end of all time.”"}],[{"start":295.55,"text":"Instead, inspired by a 1993 study that found that listening to classical music — specifically Mozart — enhances spatial-temporal reasoning, and by Don Campbell’s bestselling 1997 book The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit, Brandes studied psychology at university and then, funded by the Austrian Ministry of Culture, established the Research Program for Music-Medicine at the Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg. “Being a music producer, I dreamt about doing scientific research on the effect of music and trying to figure out what effects music has on us — cognitive, emotional, whatever,” she says. “Since then I have developed a method to use music to help people with chronic depression.”"}],[{"start":344.3,"text":"If there is a Mozart effect, perhaps there is a Jarrett effect too. Brandes nods eagerly. Fifty-one years after the gig, why does she think what Jarrett did touched so many listeners? “The narrative. He is telling us a story. He’s telling us the story of his life. He’s telling us the story of this night in his music. And it doesn’t require words because he does it so intelligently.”"}],[{"start":367.2,"text":"She thinks it is beloved in part because of its uplifting therapeutic effects. “It transports us. It is so encouraging. It’s like, never give up. This is the story that this music tells us that is so powerful.”"}],[{"start":381.15,"text":"‘Köln 75’ is in UK cinemas on June 5"}],[{"start":385.29999999999995,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":405.25,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780129971_3628.mp3"}