Plenty of music biopics are unable to use songs by the artists they depict. Some, like the 2020 Bowie-related movie Stardust, struggle as a result; others, like Backbeat or Nowhere Boy, find ways to tell a more introspective tale. “For me, it was a beautiful obstacle to overcome,” says Ido Fluk, the Israeli writer and director of Köln 75, which dramatises the events surrounding Keith Jarrett’s famous Köln Concert without being able to feature a single note of his music. “It’s about this legendary concert where a pianist has to improvise for an hour on a broken piano. As artists, the creative process is often about dealing with obstructions and obstacles. Telling this story without using any of the original music was our broken piano.”
Plenty of music biopics are unable to use songs by the artists they depict. Some, like the 2020 Bowie-related movie Stardust, struggle as a result; others, like Backbeat or Nowhere Boy, find ways to tell a more introspective tale. “For me, it was a beautiful obstacle to overcome,” says Ido Fluk, the Israeli writer and director of Köln 75, which dramatises the events surrounding Keith Jarrett’s famous Köln Concert without being able to feature a single note of his music. “It’s about this legendary concert where a pianist has to improvise for an hour on a broken piano. As artists, the creative process is often about dealing with obstructions and obstacles. Telling this story without using any of the original music was our broken piano.”
Fifty years ago, the American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett turned up to play a solo gig at the Cologne Opera House and, instead of the 10ft-long, half-ton Bösendorfer concert grand that he was expecting, he was given a weedy, 6ft rehearsal piano with broken pedals. A furious Jarrett wanted to cancel but ended up reluctantly playing the gig, using the instrument’s limitations to improvise in a completely different way. Against the odds, a live recording of the show ended up shifting more than four million copies, becoming the biggest-selling solo piano album in history and turning Jarrett into a star.
Köln 75 explores the chaotic events leading up the concert, with John Magaro playing a spiky Keith Jarrett and Mala Emde playing Vera Brandes, the feisty teenage promoter who ultimately talked him into playing the show. Fluk says that his aim was to “move the focus away from Jarrett, the brooding artist, and instead look at the people who help to facilitate art. Vera Brandes was 16 when she started booking concerts. She’s a legend in Germany, and her story is as important to the Köln Concert as Jarrett’s. When I decided to make the film, I tracked her down and found her living in Greece. She said she’d been waiting 50 years for someone to tell her story!”
Switching between English and German dialogue, Köln 75 often breaks the fourth wall and uses an elliptical narrative approach that goes off on entertaining tangents. “Many music biopics are very formulaic,” argues Fluk. “The origin story, the tortured genius, the excesses of addiction, the triumphant comeback concert, etcetera. I wanted something more freewheeling. My spirit guide was Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People: fast, energetic and fun.”
The famously reclusive Keith Jarrett had no input into the film, but his brother Chris – also a renowned pianist – was a script advisor. “We wanted to make sure we got our portrayal of Keith right,” says Fluk. Help also came from the film’s producer Oren Moverman, who co-wrote two of the more impressively unorthodox music biopics of recent times, I’m Not There and Love & Mercy.
The Köln Concert is the subject of another upcoming film called Lost In Köln, a documentary that forensically interviews dozens of people involved in the show. Brandes was involved in both projects, and Fluk sees them as complementary. “But my film certainly isn’t a documentary,” he emphasise. “I also didn’t really want it to be a jazz film, just as The Köln Concert isn’t really a ‘jazz’ album – it’s as much a piece of country-rock, blues and classical music. I wanted to make something similarly genre-free, something that wasn’t gatekeepy, something accessible to everyone.”
Köln 75 will be released in the UK later this year
