Once upon a time in West Germany: how a broken piano resulted in the best-selling album ever
In 2024, I was lucky enough to catch the virtuoso piano player Yuja Wang in concert. Spectacular barely covers it; I’ve never seen anything like it. The sheer level of precision, ferocity and musicality on display dwarfed most concerts I’ve seen. Since I was working at the venue where the concert was hosted at the time, I was also privy to the scientific level of preparation and military level of protection her piano was subject to in the days leading up to the concert.
It makes sense. After all, she’s an instrumentalist with a whole lot more than her 10,000 hours put in, and she deserves to play on the best pianos available with the best service available. However, nearly half a century ago, an exhausted pianist playing a broken piano after only a few hours’ notice gave the world the highest-selling piano album ever and one of the highest-selling solo jazz albums ever. It’s probably best they don’t try to replicate it any time soon, though.
The story begins with the legendary jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. A child prodigy, Jarrett took up the piano before the age of three and, by the age of seven, had played his first formal piano recital. Jarrett could have had a great career in classical piano and was invited to study classical composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. However, he’d had his head turned by something very different.
Inspired by a Dave Brubeck concert he attended in high school, Jarrett had fallen for jazz music and wanted to dedicate his life to playing it. Fortunately, he took to jazz just as spectacularly as he did with classical music and spent the 1960s playing with the likes of Miles Davis, releasing his own records and fielding the affection of famous fans like The Beatles.
In 1973, he began forgoing sheet music altogether and playing solo, entirely improvised concerts on the piano, the recordings of which have become some of the most revered in the history of jazz. Which brings us to Köln. In 1975, Jarrett was on an extensive tour of Europe and was coming into one of the shows earmarked to be recorded.
He’d made the overnight trip down from Switzerland during a terrific rainstorm which meant he didn’t sleep a wink, and his back was acting up. However, he was looking forward to getting a good meal in him, and playing the Bösendorfer 290 Imperial grand piano he’d specifically requested for the night. He would get neither. On the morning of the concert, the tech team assumed the venue’s rehearsal piano, a dilapidated Bösendorfer baby grand, was the one Jarrett requested.
So, they’d installed it without realizing that it needed nearly a whole day’s worth of tuning, the pedals didn’t work, and the upper registers sounded like squeaking mice. Jarrett himself discovered all of this mere hours before he was due on stage, long after it was too late for anyone to rectify their mistake. Then the restaurant mixed up his order, and he couldn’t eat anything before going on stage. Worth remembering this next time your train home from work is delayed.
Despite being very tempted to, Jarrett didn’t cancel the show as the recording equipment had already been set up. He decided to just go for it. After all, it was an improvised show. He could keep playing to the middle of the keyboard where the sound was richer and just keep vamping on the bass notes to give the effect that they were stronger and delayed. It wasn’t ideal, but he could at least get through it and wouldn’t have to do it again later.
One wonders what he thought the show could have been at its best, maybe a decent novelty or an anecdote for interviews. Nobody could have expected one of the most celebrated pieces of jazz piano ever released, one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time and the commercial peak of his solo career: The Köln Concert.
However, that remains one of the aspects jazz has over classical music. The Yuja Wang performance was an astonishing technical feat, but one that could be repeated at a moment’s notice. No one, save for those lucky few in the Köln Opera House, will ever see that show replicated again.
