I’m on a kick of trying to escape algorithmic capture and expand into new media. Part of this includes watching videos about the backstories of famous musical events, especially a few about which I had previously known very little. One of those videos was about the Koln Concert.

Keith Jarrett played a piano concert in Koln in January 1975, late at night after an opera performance. The concert promoter was an eighteen year old young woman, which is impressive in its own right as she sold out the venue for a show starting at 11:30 PM, but there was a snafu with the venue and the piano placed on stage was an out-of-tune baby grand. Jarrett wanted to cancel the concert, but since the sound engineers who were going to record it were already set up he agreed to play anyway. He improvised the whole performance, working with the piano instead of fighting it. The recording became the best selling piano album and the best selling solo jazz album of all time. I listened to the whole thing this week. Though I don’t know enough about music theory or how to play the piano to comment on its technical merits, I enjoyed listening. My grandmother would be proud.

One of my regular YouTube subscriptions also mentioned the Koln Concert this week. The channel (Michael MacKelvie) is mainly video essays on sport science topics and analytics, but the most recent video was a complete and deliberate break from that and hinted at some troubling aspects of pop culture being so recursive at present. He doesn’t use the word recursive in the video, but what else encapsulates a world where all ten of the highest grossing films last year were either sequels or prequels (and most of the nominees for best song in pop categories sampled prior tracks as well)? He used the Koln Concert as evidence that humanity doesn’t actually want perfection in art, an assertion that can be generalized beyond art.