On January 24, 1975, Keith Jarrett played the first ever jazz recital in the Köln Opera House to a packed audience. The concert was a last-minute affair thrown into the middle of an insane tour schedule (it was Jarrett’s fifth improvisational concert in eight days, with six more to follow by February 5). The organization was rushed, bordering on the downright disastrous. Jarrett performed in Freiburg, Germany on the 21st, and was headed to Zürich, Switzerland, for a performance on the 23rd when 17-year-old Vera Brandes called to say she had secured a late-night slot at the Opera House on the 24th (at 11 pm, after their regular evening performance). Despite being his scheduled day off, Jarrett agreed even though he probably needed the rest: debilitating back pain meant he slept badly and performed in a brace throughout the tour. On the 24th, he and his producer, Manfred Eicher, spent the better part of the day travelling from Zürich to Köln, arriving late in the afternoon in the middle of a rainstorm.
On arrival at the Opera House, Jarrett discovered that instead of the Bösendorfer 290 imperial grand concert piano he had requested, the staff had wheeled a derelict Bösendorfer baby grand onto the stage. The instrument was out of tune; the black keys in the middle didn’t work; the pedals stuck. Frankly, the piano was unplayable, and nowhere near big enough to carry sound to the balconies of the Opera House. Jarrett walked out. Vera Brandes stood outside his car in the rain and begged him to play. He relented.
While Jarret and Eicher went to dinner, Brandes tried to resolve the piano debacle. Tuners set to work on the baby grand while she tracked down the actual piano she had asked for. The movers had closed for the day and the only way she could get it to the venue would be to wheel it through the streets of Köln in pouring rain. Clearly, that was not an option. Jarrett’s dinner was a disaster: His food arrived late, and he barely had time to scarf down a few bites before leaving to perform, hungry, in pain and almost delirious from lack of sleep.
Despite the hours of retuning, the upper registers of the piano remained tinny; the bass registers weak. Jarrett was forced to stay in the middle registers with the faulty black keys, pummeling the piano to create enough sound to carry through the Opera House. To hide the lack of resonance, he kept up a repetitive bass for much of the performance. And so, standing up to hit the keys, playing through the imperfections of his instrument, and masking his own back pain, Keith Jarrett produced one of his most memorable performances.
Afterwards, neither Jarret nor his producer were satisfied with the technical quality of the recording. That technology, too, appears to have stuttered. Listening to the recording now, you can hear the imperfections—an apt finale to a perfectly disastrous day. Even so, both men recognized something special about the performance and agreed to release it. The Köln Concert has become one of the most iconic jazz albums in the world, flaws and all.
And it all started with a display of tolerance and a willingness to overlook what a lesser person than Jarret may have considered an unforgivable oversight and lack of organization by Vera Brandes.
I retell this story today because I think it relevant to the past year and to the one we’re entering. Last year delivered its fair share of organizational disasters, blemishes, and imperfect performances. In the unfamiliar online environment, organizers messed up. Technology failed. Performers experimented with new technology and new modes, sometimes failing and sometimes producing sublime performances. Even the most technologically challenged among us learned to Zoom, bought microphones and webcams, discovered ring lighting, recorded ourselves, and became self-proclaimed armchair internet mavens.
COVID-19 broke our past irrevocably and as a result, most of us want to look back at 2020 in the perfect tense: something completed and put behind us. However, what we really need to do is see it in the imperfect tense: a continuing tense that sees events as continuously unfolding in a progressive action in the future. In the imperfect, we are always moving towards the present and the future. Beneath the surface-level imperfections of 2020 lies the remarkable we need to acknowledge: through all the unforeseen difficulties and disasters, we learned to be tolerant of our flaws and embraced the value of imperfection.
We used the flawed and broken instruments at our disposal and performed. We rumbled persistently in the bass and masked the tinny high registers as best we could, dealt with a fickle and overworked internet, and avoided the broken bits as best we could while hiding the pain of losing loved ones. We improvised and produced the performances of our lives: We played on baby grands and filled the uppermost balconies of the internet with sound. We were Keith Jarrett in Köln.
In 2021, I ask only that you continue to embrace this flawed moment: after all, the future as it stands is imperfect.