Keith Jarrett was having a bad day on January 24th, 1975.
He had arrived in Cologne, Germany, to play a show at the famous Cologne Opera House, after a long drive from playing a show in Zurich. He hadn’t slept, and was wearing a brace to cope with severe back pain.
Scheduled to go on stage in a few hours, he was sitting in an Italian restaurant waiting (and waiting) for his food to arrive. The table had been booked by the promoter of the concert he was supposed to play. The promoter was only 17 years old, and the fact that she had booked a world-famous jazz pianist to be the first jazz musician to play at the storied Cologne Opera House was quite impressive.
Less impressive, however, was the fact that the staff at the Opera House had set up the wrong piano for Jarrett to play.
Earlier, when Jarrett had gone onstage to rehearse, he had found an old, poorly maintained, out-of-tune baby grand piano – a kind of back-up piano only intended for rehearsals. The promoter wanted to get another one, but the rental truck was gone and no other piano could arrive in time.
Jarrett, a noted perfectionist, announced to everyone on stage that he would not be playing, and stormed off to have the dinner that was now failing to arrive to his table at the Italian restaurant. When it finally arrived, Jarrett took a couple of bites, decided he hated it, and headed back to the Opera House. And then, standing in the wings watching the recording engineers setting up to record the concert that might not even happen, Jarrett had a change of heart.
All I remember after the restaurant fiasco is taking a peek at the engineers sitting, waiting with their equipment. They had everything ready. And I started thinking, “I’m going to do this.”
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He went out on stage, in front of an audience of 1400, in a historic building whose walls had never heard jazz before, at a piano that was not fit for the spotlight, to play a show booked by a teenager who at this point wasn’t having such a great day herself.
Jarrett sat at the piano and started improvising. His opening lines mimicked the chime that plays in the Opera House five minutes before showtime; the “take your seats, please” jingle. On the recording, you can hear faint chuckles of recognition in the audience. That moment seemed to melt all the tension in the air, as Jarrett noted later:
It just seemed like everybody in the audience was there for a tremendous experience, and that made my job easy. What happened with this piano was that I was forced to play in what was — at the time — a new way. Somehow I felt I had to bring out whatever qualities this instrument had.
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The recording was released at the end of that year, and is currently the best-selling piano recording of all time.
There’s some kind of a lesson here about bad days, but I’m not sure how best to articulate it. I guess everyone’s life has its share of late dinners and back pain and wrong pianos, at least metaphorically. But bad days are a dime a dozen. The real life-saving skill is being able to find the creativity to make a bad day turn around, the way Jarrett did when he improvised the opening notes of the concert.
This track is the final part of the recording, after Jarrett had taken the audience on an improvised hour-plus journey. A very satisfying end to what had been a very bad day.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. It begins like a stressful morning: chromatic descending patters, high-strung melodic lines in the right hand.
2. As it nears the three-minute mark, it settles into a more introspective, relaxed evening: echoes of the melody from the first half, but sounding much more like a lullaby than before.
3. Because it’s the last part of the concert, it ends with nearly a minute and a half of applause, which, if you’ve had a bad day, I encourage you to listen to and imagine that the crowd is congratulating you on making it through.
Recommended listening activity:
Emphatically crossing off a day on the calendar.