‘K?ln 75’ Review: John Magaro Hits the Right Notes in a Frustrating Music Drama That Marginalizes the Headliner
Keith Jarrett’s 1975 double album, The K?ln Concert, recorded at the Cologne Opera House earlier that year, sold over four million copies. If you flipped through the album stacks of just about anyone who considered themselves a collector of cool vinyl in the ‘70s, you were likely to come across the famous black-and-white cover shot of the American jazz pianist, eyes closed, hunched over the keys. The live recording of improvised solo piano composition is music to lose yourself in, swirling and transporting, spiritual and transcendent. Jarrett plays with intense feeling, which makes his free-flowing keyboard magic unexpectedly moving.
Ido Fluk’s K?ln 75 tells the story of how the landmark concert threatened to fall apart, right up until a half-hour before the 11 p.m. show was scheduled to start. John Magaro is terrific as Jarrett, a once-in-a-generation talent who was sleep-deprived, suffering from acute back pain and disdainful of the inferior instrument on which he was expected to perform. But he’s continually sidelined by the frenetic, minimally compelling drama of how self-invented 18-year-old music promoter Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) struggled, against all odds, to make the concert happen. That makes this movie a missed opportunity.
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Fluk’s screenplay tries to make a case for its chosen focus in a fussy voiceover intro — later revealed to be the words of fourth wall-breaking jazz critic Michael Watts (Michael Chernus) — likening Jarrett’s concert to Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. Visiting the Vatican City masterpiece is not the same, Watts argues, as witnessing the artist perched on scaffolding in the act of creation. By inference, he suggests that listening to Jarrett’s concert recording is not the same as being there. You don’t say.
Watts then explains that K?ln 75 is not about the concert but about the scaffolding on which it was built. Given the vicissitudes of the one-night-only, full-house event, the idea has potential. But Vera’s story, framed to negligible effect by her 50th birthday party (where she’s played by Susanne Wolff), is told almost like a teen-emancipation caper comedy about a plucky high school senior driven by her daddy issues to succeed.
This is one of those hyper-active movies where people — especially Vera — are constantly rushing about with maximum urgency but without whipping up corresponding narrative vigor. Second-rate European films about counterculture-era youth always seem to feature them racing around breathlessly, as if that somehow equates with anti-authoritarian defiance.
The dominant Vera thread is an odd fit for the more soulful drama of Magaro’s Jarrett, on an overnight drive from Lausanne, Switzerland, to Cologne in a boxy old Renault with Manfred Eicher (Alexander Scheer), the ECM Records founder who had the foresight to record the concert despite all signs pointing to disaster.
There’s pathos in the anomaly of a major music artist — Jarrett had played in Miles Davis’ band, among others, before going his own way musically — on a tour with such a threadbare budget that they cashed in plane tickets to cover expenses. That account draws us in with a depth that’s missing from the succession of hamster-wheel scenes in which Vera scuttles around town in her go-go boots and mini-skirt and shearling coat to remedy one fresh crisis or another.
The Watts character, a composite of a handful of jazz journalists from the time, inserts himself with poetic license into Keith and Manfred’s overnight drive, hoping to wear down the pianist’s resistance toward sitting for an interview while they bond on the road. Keith remains to a large degree elusive, but Magaro subtly gives us insight into what drives his artistry, which is then augmented by Watts’ observations, from a critic’s P.O.V., and those of Manfred, a protective friend and professional associate with a profound respect for Jarrett’s gifts.
Fluk laces the film with occasional documentary touches like archival inserts or contextualization detours, some of which work better than others. In a quick primer on the evolution of jazz, Watts says of Jarrett: “He’s departing from jazz and playing pure music, undefined by anything but the player, the music, and of course, the piano.” Though it’s not touched on here, Jarrett in later interviews said his improvisational flights were also defined in part by the audience.
All this suggests how rewarding a deeper dive into Jarrett as both man and musician might have been. But the busy Vera story only really intersects with the Keith and Manfred side toward the end, and even then, not in an emotionally satisfying or substantial way.
End credits text reveals that Brandes went on to form a record label and establish a fruitful career as a music producer and publisher. There might be a quirky origin story to be told about a young woman who got her professional start at 16 via Ronnie Scott (Daniel Betts), owner of the London jazz club, when her powers of persuasion so impressed him that he hired her to book a series of German dates for his trio. But Fluk doesn’t have a firm enough handle on the material to make that story interesting. And the uneven division of the Keith and Vera plotlines makes K?ln 75 a movie without a narrative center.
Emde does what she can with a role that lacks complexity, throwing herself into it with hard-charging physicality. But Vera is defined mainly by her unyielding gumption, which becomes tiresomely one-note.
She bucks against the rigidity of her stern orthodontist father (Ulrich Tukur), secretly using the separate phone line in his dental surgery downstairs from the family apartment to book gigs. But the movie doesn’t provide much nitty-gritty on how Vera develops as an entrepreneur beyond speaking in English and pretending to be calling from London.
Her circle of friends is enlisted to help. That includes best pal Isa (Shirin Eissa), older boyfriend Jan (Enno Trebs), transfer student Oliver (Leon Blohm) and older brother Fritz (Leo Meier), who professes to hate Vera but hates their father more. They zip around town in Fritz’s car flyposting concert posters and trying to avoid being caught by cops. But there’s nothing distinctive enough about any of the relationships to give those stock scenes vitality.
Vera is stunned the first time she sees Jarrett play in Berlin, rocking and swaying at the keyboard, in unbroken communion with the instrument. His face registers every chord or riff with what could be torture or ecstasy. Perplexingly, the script then leapfrogs over their initial encounter and Vera’s negotiations to handle the Cologne concert. Instead, it goes straight to her dealings with the snooty opera house director, who scoffs at the idea but eventually gives her a late-night slot, after the evening performance of Lulu. All she needs is 10,000 deutschmarks.
That challenge yields some hackneyed family drama, with the more intriguing developments compressed into a hurried concluding stretch. Anyone familiar with the mystique surrounding the Cologne concert will know about Jarrett’s indignation to find not the requested B?sendorfer Grand Imperial on the stage but an out-of-tune baby grand rehearsal piano with only one functioning pedal. Tuners could only do so much in the short time available, and it took much cajoling to convince Keith to go on at all. But the show was an alchemical miracle.
Which is the final insult. We see a brief frame or two of Jarrett at the keyboard, but we hear nothing until the thunderous applause at the end of the performance. Even if it was a music rights issue, there had to be more creative ways around it. It feels unearned that the camera stays on Vera, dizzy with relief and laughter over something she discovers backstage, while the soundtrack blasts Nina Simone’s cover of the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody.” If that song choice pertains to this story in any way, I wish someone would explain it.
There’s probably a dramatically robust film to be made about Jarrett’s 1975 European tour and the summit of the Cologne concert. And Magaro would be an ideal choice to play him. No moment is as moving here as Watts asking, “Do you ever worry about failing?” to which Keith replies, “Every night.” Sadly, this isn’t that movie.
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