16/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: An 18-year-old concert promoter stages one of the most legendary jazz gigs in history, by Keith Jarrett, in Ido Fluk’s biopic

In one respect, Keith Jarrett’s legendary solo piano record The Köln Concert has already enjoyed a definitive cinematic close-up. Moving far beyond a “needle drop” soundtrack cue that might last under a minute, Nanni Moretti devoted a whole passage of his classic Dear Diary to an extended tracking shot of the director himself, making a pilgrimage on a moped to the beach where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered, non-diegetically accompanied by Jarrett’s piano trilling. This curatorial decision by Moretti selflessly cedes his artistry to Jarrett’s, whose meandering improvisations fully determine the scene’s eerie tone.

So, as ever in fictionalisations of the lives of great musicians, Ido Fluk has chosen a pedestrian, although sometimes punchy, route to unveiling Jarrett’s achievement in Köln 75 [+see also:
interview: Ido Fluk
film profile], although he wisely devotes one of its key narrative strands to the Cologne concert’s promoter, Vera Brandes (played by Mala Emde in her late teens), whose endearing advocacy helped burnish jazz’s cultural legacy. The film premieres today as a Berlinale Special Gala screening. 

Fluk’s screenplay is bifurcated in structure, and also in quality: engaging and effervescent when detailing Brandes’ decisive contribution to Jarrett’s legend, as well as European jazz overall, and more turgid as we observe the difficult circumstances behind the US pianist’s (a saggy-eyed John Magaro) own performance. With his back and posture harried by a playing style that no strict music teacher would ever condone, and his body clock wrecked from an ad hoc cross-country touring routine, having this dramatised for us (with some pro-forma “difficult artist” behavioural mannerisms from Magaro) doesn’t enhance our appreciation of the music and the eccentricities of its construction, as Jarrett left the melodic development of his performance to absolute chance from the moment he lifted the piano lid.

Brandes’ triumphant trajectory, meanwhile, underlines the credo that you have to “fake it to make it”. Hypnotised by jazz’s insistent swing feel and harmonic freedom at a Cologne ice-cream parlour that doubles as a venue, she encapsulates the particular way young people can submit to music’s addictive, all-encompassing life force. With a disapproving father (Ulrich Tukur) very much belonging to the previous German generation, and his profession of dentistry representing a kind of bourgeois philistinism to her mindset, the film gains credence by exposing the unlikely source supporting such a rush of avant-garde music. It’s warming to see jazz treated in the typically vaunted manner of rock and roll in music-related films, with a fourth wall-breaking “explainer” sequence by a journalist character played by Michael Chernus (a timely casting, given his role in the Bob Dylan tale A Complete Unknown) clarifying, yet never dumbing down, jazz’s journey from up-tempo popular music to painstaking, structureless free improvisation.

Ironically for Jarrett, the pendulum swung back around: whilst it’s not true of The Köln Concert specifically, some of his later releases would comfortably be classified as serene New Age music, an ideal accompaniment to places like the dental surgery of Vera’s own father. In all, Köln 75 undeniably frustrates for understanding so well how great music can make its own listeners and passionate adherents more important than those creating the sounds themselves; showing us the recording’s inner workings is a generous touch, with the film arriving as part of an overall 50th-anniversary multimedia celebration of the album, yet especially for Jarrett (in comparison to Bob Dylan, to invoke him again), his music’s uncanny appeal forecloses the need to delve into his ego.

Köln 75 is a production by Germany, Poland and Belgium, staged by One Two Films, in co-production with Extreme Emotions, Lemming Film België and Alamode Filmproduktion. Its world sales are handled by Bankside Films.