Since the very beginning, jazz was fueled by myths and legends. Jazz musicians are among the best raconteurs alive, partly because they spend so much time on the road, and meet so many people.
In the pantheon of jazz mythology, the story of pianist Keith Jarret’s legendary recording of The Köln Concert from 1975 ranks among the top.
The album - which features Jarrett performing a totally improvised solo concert, captured during a midnight performance at the Cologne Opera House - is both the best-selling solo album and the best-selling piano album in jazz history. In 2025, the album was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry.
And it’s a concert that nearly didn’t happen. This is where the legend comes in: It’s a story that has been told among musicians for years, and now it has been memorialized in the film Köln 75.
The show had been organized by an 18 year old girl named Vera Brandes - Germany’s youngest concert promoter. Vera had been booking tours in Germany for a couple of years already by this point. A jazz fan from a very young age, Vera got her start by organizing events at her school.
“I was on my bicycle from one rehearsal room to the other, most of them in churches, and I would go and look at the bands and pick who we wanted to invite for our next school party. So kind of I grew up as a promotor,” she says.
As her ambitions grew - encouraged by jazz musicians she met, like the British saxophone player Ronnie Scott, who suggested that she could be a good agent - Vera was self assured enough to trust herself more than most of the established jazz promoters she encountered.
Brandes remembers, “I was saying to myself internally, if that’s the level of your professionalism I think I can match that. I just continued doing one thing after the other and it became bigger and bigger and bigger.”
Due to a mixup at the Cologne opera house on the night of the Keith Jarrett concert, the wrong piano had been put on the stage, and rather than a Bösendorfer Imperial, which is one of the most extraordinary and expensive pianos in the world, an out of tune, broken down rehearsal piano was left on the dark and empty stage.
“It was not playable. It was just a piece of wood that would serve as decoration at that point,” she recalls.
Jarrett took one look at the instrument and said there was no way he could play it. The young Vera Brandes managed to find some piano tuners at the last minute who wrangled the piano into some kind of playable shape.
She says, “The secret heroes of the gig are the piano tuners and his son. They were just ultra professional.”
With the piano more or less manageable, she still had the task of convincing Jarrett to play for the sold out opera house audience.
“I had a very brief and sweet conversation thinking he’s going to leave and I just begged him to stay. [...] And he just stared at me. Neither him nor I blinked. It felt like an endless amount of minutes until he said ‘Okay I’ll play but never forget, just for you.’”
The resulting performance, which was captured for ECM records, tells the musical story of what happened that night. And Vera says she could tell it was special from the moment it began.
“There’s one thing that I’ve learned - you can tell what a gig’s going to be in the first three minutes. If something’s really special, it’s not only the musicians’ know it,” Brandes explains. “Everybody in the room knows it. And everybody in that room knew that this was not the Cologne opera anymore, this was a cathedral. And this was a very serious spiritual lesson. And everybody realized that some opening in the sky had just been created - I mean I don’t know how many angels were sitting on this guy’s shoulders. It was an amazing transformative thing then. I mean what transpires when you listen to the album, that happened that night.”
The film Köln 75, directed by Brooklyn based, Israeli born filmmaker Ido Fluk, and with a brilliant international cast including the German actress Mala Emde who plays the role of Vera Brandes, tells this story through an urgent and seductive lens. Fluk described it as a “jazz story with a punk rock ethos”. The immediacy and humor, sexual and countercultural undercurrent running through the film make it one of the most accessible and engaging jazz films in recent times.
And, as Brandes tells it, it’s very close to the way she remembers it. “The spirit and most of the details are correct,” she says.
You can experience most of the details and all of the spirit of Köln 75 which opens this weekend at IFC Center in New York, and will play in limited release around the country later this month. For more information visit zeitgeistfilms.com/ to see what a jazz legend looks like when it becomes a modern movie.
