Pianist Keith Jarrett: The story of 'The Köln Concert'

Interview

GRAMMY-nominated pianist discusses overcoming adversity for the recording of his GRAMMY Hall Of Fame-inducted album in Germany

Keith Jarrett

GRAMMYs

Jan 7, 2014 - 5:26 pm

GRAMMY.com

(Since its inception in 1973, the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame has enshrined nearly 1,000 recordings across all genres. The Making Of … series presents firsthand accounts of the creative process behind some of the essential recordings of the 20th century. You can read more Making Of … accounts, and in-depth insight into the recordings and artists represented in the Hall, in the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition book.)

The Köln Concert
Keith Jarrett
ECM (1975)
Album
Inducted 2011

(As told to Don Heckman)

The story of how The Köln Concert recording was made begins with ECM Records founder Manfred Eicher and I doing a driving tour of solo concerts in Europe. Some of them were recorded, some of them were not. But the Cologne concert [in Germany] was one that was definitely scheduled to be recorded. However, for a 24-hour period before we got to Cologne we had not slept at all. When we arrived at the hotel, I tried to take a nap. But it was impossible to do so.

The producer of the concert came to take us to the [Cologne Opera House] in his Rolls-Royce, a car that was so over the top that we could have eaten dinner in it, on the perfectly made wood panels. But we didn't really learn the problems we were facing until we arrived at the hall. I went onstage and realized, "Hey, I have a Bösendorfer [piano] here and it's not the right size and it sounds like a modified electric harpsichord." And then we found out that they couldn't get the right piano, even though it existed, because their rental truck was gone.

At that point, we probably said all kinds of curse words. And we started to tell the engineers, "Maybe you can just pack up." But then Manfred and I both sort of thought that was crazy. The recording equipment was already set up. So we decided to just make a tape of the performance, even it if was just for ourselves. So we went to dinner. It was already late, I was due to go onstage soon, we'd had so many hassles, and the piano was such a terrible instrument. And I hadn't slept anyway. So I was in almost hell. Then we went to this Italian restaurant where, for some perfectly symmetrical reason, we were served way last. Everyone else was eating, I was the one who was going to play in an hour, and I still didn't have any food. And then when they finally brought the food, I was still hungry, because I wasn't happy with the food they served.

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." I remember putting my fist up in the air on the way out [from] backstage. I just looked at Manfred and [said], "Power!" or something.

Someone told me that, in the very beginning of that performance, what I was playing was imitating the bells in the lobby — the little phrase they play to tell the audience when it's time to go in to the theater. To my knowledge, I have no idea [if] that was true. But then something interesting happened. 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.

And that was it. My sense was, "I have to do this. I'm doing it. I don't care what the f*** the piano sounds like. I'm doing it." And I did.

(Don Heckman has been writing about jazz and other music for five decades in The New York Times,Los Angeles Times, Jazz Times, Down Beat, Metronome, High Fidelity, and his personal blog, the International Review of Music.)

Photo Gallery

The Making Of Music From Big Pink

Robbie Robertson details the making of the Band's 1968 GRAMMY Hall Of Fame-inducted opus

Robbie Robertson

GRAMMYs

Dec 4, 2013 - 10:42 am

GRAMMY.com

Music From Big Pink
The Band
Capitol (1968)
Album
Inducted 1998

(As told to Lynne Margolis)

[During] the making of Music From Big Pink, we were completely in our own underground. And while we were making this record, it was a very private thing, because we were trying to do something that was a culmination of a lot of music that we had pulled in over the years. And it had nothing to with what we did with Bob Dylan. It had nothing to do with what we did with the Hawks. It had nothing to do with what we did with Ronnie Hawkins. It had nothing to do with any way that we had played in the past.

So we were reinventing ourselves, and at the same time, it was who we were in that discovery process. And when that record came out, the way that it was received was like, "Oh my God, where could this have come from? Who are these people? What are they doing?" And we were like, "What do you mean, what are we doing?" It was just a combination of all the music that we loved.

We had been together for seven years before we made Music From Big Pink. We had done our woodshedding. We had paid our dues, and this was the result of that. We didn't get guitars for Christmas and say, "Let's start a band." So there was a beautiful depth to that. And then the way that the world received [the album], finally … to this day, it's still a tremendously influential record.

(Austin, Texas-based writer/editor Lynne Margolis contributes regularly to print, broadcast and online media including American Songwriter and Lone Star Music magazines. Outlets also have included the Christian Science Monitor, Paste, Rollingstone.com, and NPR. A contributing editor to the encyclopedia, The Ties That Bind: Bruce Springsteen From A To E To Z, Margolis also writes bios for new and established artists.)

News

The Making Of Chick Corea's "Now He Sings, Now He Sobs"

20-time GRAMMY winner discusses the inspiration behind his GRAMMY Hall Of Fame-inducted recording

GRAMMYs

Dec 30, 2013 - 12:00 am

GRAMMY.com

"Now He Sings, Now He Sobs"
Chick Corea
Blue Note (1968)
Single
Inducted 1999

(As told to Don Heckman)

The title Now He Sings, Now He Sobs comes from I Ching, an ancient Chinese book that I was into in the '60s when I was studying different philosophies and religions. It's also known as the "Book Of Changes." And it has a section named "Now He Sings; Now He Sobs — Now He Beats The Drum; Now He Stops." The poetry of that phrase fit the message of the trio's music on Now He Sings, Now He Sobs to me. You know, the gamut of life experiences — the whole human picture and range of emotions.

There were a lot of different directions in jazz being tried out at that time. It was a period of exploration with several great exploratory leaders like Miles, Coltrane, Ornette, Mingus, and many more. I was into that atmosphere of trying out new approaches. And I was also checking out Bartók, Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Alban Berg, and some other composers who were also trying new things.

The recording sessions had a concentration and intensity that was thick in the atmosphere of the studio. [Drummer] Roy [Haynes] and [bassist Miroslav Vitouš] were meeting for the first time and we had all these new tunes to deal with without any rehearsal. So it was tense for a while. But then, when Roy put his beat on things and added his humor and lightness as our "elder," things loosened up and the music started to fly.

When the recording continued to get attention, I knew some kind of special effect had been created — otherwise how are you to know the result of something except in your own head?

But if I had to look at Now He Sings… from outside myself, I see it as a natural part of the growth of the jazz culture which I've always been so happy — honored, really — to be a small part of. Jazz musicians from Duke and Satchmo on through Bird, Diz, Miles, Trane, and Monk have kept a very important flame of freedom and individual expression alive and well in our world and I think it's really important. It's a culture of ways of life and tastes in art and living that continually got passed down, starting from the first Africans that hit the Western world and were nurtured first in America. Of course, now the stream of expression and attitude towards creativeness that they represented has spread over the world.

So I came along in the '60s having absorbed as much as I could up until then and added my own tastes and search into the equation. I guess that's how I see Now He Sings, Now He Sobs in relation to the development of jazz in general. And I'm happy to know that so many people thought that "Now He Sings, Now He Sobs" is deserving of an award like this. It inspires me to come up with something new.

(Don Heckman has been writing about jazz and other music for five decades in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Jazz Times, Down Beat, Metronome, High Fidelity, and his personal blog, the International Review of Music.)

News

The Making Of Pink Floyd's The Wall

Producer Bob Ezrin recalls the building blocks of Pink Floyd's GRAMMY Hall Of Fame-inducted album

Bob Ezrin

GRAMMYs

Dec 13, 2013 - 10:57 am

GRAMMY.com

The Wall
Pink Floyd
Columbia (1979)
Album
Inducted 2008

(As told to Tammy La Gorce)

It was Roger [Waters'] wife, Carolyne [Christie], who approached me about doing The Wall. She had actually worked with me on an Alice Cooper project years before in London. The idea was, because this was so much Roger's own project and not a group effort, he needed a kind of referee between him and the rest of the band — someone who could help him realize his vision and deal with the rest of the band without creating problems between him and them.

In the beginning we had a very long demo that Roger had written. We started to separate out the pieces, and when we looked at the storyline we realized what we needed was a through line, something to get us from start to finish.

I started writing, and in the process of doing that I began to realize, "I'm writing a script." It took one night in my flat in London. I closed my eyes and wrote out the movie that would become The Wall.

The next day in the studio, we made copies of the script and handed them out, and we all sat down for a table read.

We laid down the bits of music we had from the demo, and obviously there were songs missing, bits of the script where we didn't yet have a song. We'd mark those "TBW" — "to be written." "Comfortably Numb" was a TBW song. With the screenplay, we had a real framework for how things would go, and it proved crucial.

I think it was remarkable how fast we finished it. When you add it all up, we spent maybe seven or eight months in the studio. We started in England, then we went to the South of France, and we finished up in Los Angeles. Think about it: You can read stories about some of the more indulgent albums, like [Guns N' Roses'] Chinese Democracy, where 10 or 12 years were spent on something that ends up with a whimper and not a bang. When you think about that, we worked pretty quick.

Overall, [The Wall] was a fantastic experience. An amazing accomplishment.

(Tammy La Gorce is a freelance writer whose work appears regularly in The New York Times.)

Interview

Judy Collins on recording Joni Mitchell's 'Both Sides Now'

Judy Collins details meeting Joni Mitchell and the making of her 1968 GRAMMY Hall Of Fame-inducted hit

Judy Collins

GRAMMYs

Dec 18, 2013 - 9:15 am

GRAMMY.com

"Both Sides Now"
Elektra (1968)
Single
Inducted 2003

(As told to Roy Trakin)

I was sound asleep in my uptown New York apartment in 1967 when my old friend Al Kooper called on the phone. "I've just met this girl here in the bar. … She and I were talking and she told me she wrote songs. She's good-looking and I figured I could follow her home, which couldn't be a bad thing no matter how you look at it."

He put her [on the phone] and Joni Mitchell proceeded to sing me "Both Sides Now." It turned out she could write songs. I told him, "I'll be right over." I recorded the song and it became a big hit, though not immediately. People loved it on the album, but it took a few remixes by David Anderle before it was appropriate to go on radio, [where] it did quite wonderfully.

We recorded the song as part of the Wildflowers album in New York, with Mark Abramson producing and Josh Rifkin [conducting]. That album has virtually no guitars on it, except for "Both Sides Now." Josh had the smart, wonderful and amazing idea to put a harpsichord on the arrangement, which I think took it a long way. It's a great song, timeless and singable, even today, and did a great deal for my career, because people started answering my phone calls. It also led to a lot of success for Joni, who was given the respect she deserved as a songwriter, and was able to record it herself.

Hearing that song and deciding to cover it turned out to be an organic, holistic experience that happens immediately and without explanation. Some people are bound to sing certain songs. It was instantly obvious to me that "Both Sides Now" was my song. There's no science or way to predict it. I probably learned that from my father, who was in the radio business. He sang Rodgers and Hart and always chose the best songs from their shows, the ones that became hits. My mother said I came by this talent honestly because I inherited it from him. I know exactly what song will last and was meant for me to sing — "Both Sides Now" was one of those. It's all about gut instinct, which comes with training, time, experience, and knowing what you love to sing and what you hate. That's a lifetime education. And the song doesn't necessarily depend on the writer. It takes on a life of its own. The song knows where it's meant to go, and it knows what to do when it gets there.

That same year [1967], I was on the board of the Newport Jazz Festival and pushed to have a singer/songwriter workshop with Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Janis Ian, and Tom Paxton. And I believe that helped kick off the careers of both Joni and Leonard, along with my covers of their songs. It was a really important event for the festival, because the traditional types were so against bringing in these younger performers who wrote their own material.

(Roy Trakin, a senior editor for HITS magazine, has written for every rock publication that ever mattered, some that didn't, and got paid by most of them.)