🎶The Köln Concert

A solo piano concert, improvised from the first note to the last, recorded at the opera house in Cologne on 24 January 1975. Two LPs, four sides, a little over an hour.

It is Jonas Reuter's record, in every sense. His copy came out of the racks at 🛒 Side B Records on one of his Saturday detours, years before I knew him, and it is the one he puts on when he wants to think and does not want to say so. I have learned to read it as a signal, like a closed door that is not locked.

The story behind it, which he told me the first time and I checked afterwards because it sounded too good:

• The concert was organised by a teenager, the youngest promoter in Germany.
• The piano delivered to the stage was the wrong one: a small rehearsal instrument, thin at the top, weak in the bass, with pedals that did not work properly.
• Jarrett had driven for hours, had not slept and had a bad back. He nearly refused.
• He played anyway, late at night after the opera, and kept to the middle of the keyboard and to repeated, rolling figures in the left hand because that was what the instrument could bear.

It became the best-selling solo piano record there is. The limits are audible, and they are why it sounds the way it does. I work in software and I am supposed to know this already.

28 December. After lunch he put it on, brought the page from the fridge to the kitchen table, and we spent the whole of sides one and two on a single question. Somewhere in the second side he took the pencil and crossed out the fifth line of my list of fears himself. By the time he turned the record over we had 📜 Take the sabbatical from September 2026: four months, and the flat can wait until 2027.

I will not be able to hear the opening again without being at that table. That is a lot to ask of one opening phrase, and it can take it.