Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert is a sort of un-Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall: everyone at the Sex Pistols concert in 1976 started a world-class punk band; everyone who hears The Köln Concert becomes a world-class snob. Köln 75 was made to pander to those snobs, and it rubs the edges off of other hipster-adjacent pieces of media — Uncut Gems sans anxiety, Fleabag sans wit — in its amiable and largely successful attempt to dramatize the recording of Jarrett’s legendary live album for us. But hey, snobs need crowd-pleasers, too.
Köln 75 insists in its cheeky opening, wherein it equates Jarrett’s eponymous concert with the painting of the Sistine Chapel — not an unfair comparison — in that it’s not about the masterpiece itself, but about how the masterpiece happened: Michelangelo needed scaffolding to paint, Jarrett needed a stage and piano. The film then abruptly cuts to a present-day birthday party for concert promoter Vera Brandes, during which her father berates her for being the greatest disappointment of his life. Vera deadpans, “Let’s do this again,” into the camera, sending the movie careening into a music studio with a jazz critic who regales us with some of his favorite false starts in music history. Vera teleports into the studio to interrupt him, snapping us back to her teen years and the meat of the movie proper.
Interruptions, fourth-wall breaks, egregiously shoehorned pop culture references — there’s no getting around it, Köln 75 is Deadpool for jazz nerds. Riven with meta-digressions and The Big Short-style explainers, it’s the same junk food studios have been serving us since the Obama era, freeze-dried and exported to Europe only to find its way back stateside for the cognoscenti. Just as true: if this particular flavor suits your taste, the empty calories are delicious. For those unimpressed by Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Ana-Marija Markovina and a constellation of superimposed improvisational masterworks might lightly endear you to Ido Fluk’s exuberant vision of the jazz world — even when he tilts toward the maddeningly pedestrian.
Köln 75 loves jazz, but for all of the much-appreciated music cues — Neu! nestles up comfortably against Bill Evans, to name but two — it doesn’t really embody jazz. Despite the enthusiasm, both of Köln 75’s fairly discreet halves feel fundamentally safe: the movie is neatly bisected by (what else?) a Duke Ellington clip about dreams. The first half follows Vera Brandes exclusively, ambitious and scrappy and learning how to be true to herself in the shadow of her domineering father’s disapproval. The other, set after a short leap in time identified by both on-screen text and a line of dialogue directed at the audience (“It’s been a year since we’ve last seen each other”), finds Vera dashing around Köln to hit the beats laid out for her by The Köln Concert’s Wikipedia page. Both halves are winsomely slight and self-deprecating, and the actors evince a youthful revolutionary spirit on their acne-pocked faces, but like Jay Duplass before him, Fluk refuses to let his movie about improvisation do anything but pay lip service to the glory of it. In the film’s grossly generic speechifying climax, Vera berates a withdrawn, reclusive Keith Jarrett from his hotel room door. “Maybe I’m giving you an opportunity!” she shouts. “Maybe you’re afraid of truly improvising.”
Yet, despite playing a lot of obvious notes, Köln 75 is much better than this month’s other offering of musical hero worship, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. (Keith Jarrett was dropped from Columbia Records in 1972; Springsteen was signed to them the same year — make of the coincidence what you will.) It’s just as fawning, but Köln 75 earns its adulation where Springsteen does not because Vera Brandes is a believable avatar for Fluk’s worshipful approach. Brandes sees Jarrett perform, understands how beautiful the music is, and decides to hunt him down to put on a concert in Köln simply because she thinks other people should hear it — no pathology necessary. And Fluk dodges within a hair’s breadth the grotesquerie of literalizing this titan of abstract music thanks to John Magaro’s convincing Jarrett, who nails him down all the way to the little squeals Jarrett would do at the piano.
By the end of Köln 75, the uninitiated will learn more about The Köln Concert than they ever needed to: how it was performed at 11:00 PM, after an opera; how Vera Brandes procured a Grand Imperial — Jarret’s piano of choice — for him to play, but couldn’t transport it without damaging it permanently; and how physically demanding the job of solo piano improvisation was for Jarrett. Those in the know will have our senses of entitlement reified, further convinced that this album really is one of the best ever recorded. Both will learn how to properly pronounce Köln, and drive home (or walk between the living room and bedroom, such as the case may be) listening to the concert and reflecting on how cool it is they pulled this off, however unlikely. Sometimes that’s enough.
DIRECTOR: Ido Fluk; CAST: John Magaro, Mala Emde, Michael Chernus, Alexander Scheer; DISTRIBUTOR: Zeitgeist Films; IN THEATERS: October 17; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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