Note: measurements taken in the anechoic chamber at Canada’s National Research Council can be found through this link.
February 2026
David Mott, baritone saxophone master and former head of the music department at York University in Toronto, Canada, once told me that the best musicians play without ego. By creating an unmediated flow of ideas, artists like John Coltrane channel something approaching the divine. Pianist Keith Jarrett certainly belongs in that category.
In his fully improvised solo recitals, which he began performing in the early 1970s, Pennsylvania native Jarrett attempted to connect with forces beyond his consciousness. Then 25, and well regarded as a veteran of saxophonist Charles Lloyd’s quartet and a current member of Miles Davis’s band, Jarrett wasn’t unknown. However, it wasn’t clear what he would do for a full hour of improvisation, alone at the piano. As audiences soon learned, Jarrett would walk onstage without an idea of where he was going to begin or end, and let his muse transport him and his audience for stretches of 20 or 30 minutes.
This conceit is at the heart of ECM Records’ best-selling catalog item: The Köln Concert, Jarrett’s two-part solo recital, recorded at the Köln Oper in Cologne, Germany, on January 24, 1975. Of course, Jarrett being Jarrett—one of the strongest-willed and most outspoken musicians in contemporary jazz—he is never completely without ego, which makes for an interesting push and pull of internal forces.
The Cologne (Köln in German) recital has all the elements of his solo expression: long stretches of spectral runs, gospel-inflected ostinatos that generate trance-like interludes, and moments of pianistic ecstasy accompanied by guttural vocalizations. To the uninitiated, that might sound overwhelmingly self-indulgent—the opposite of ego-free playing—but the album’s spectacular sales figures reflect the fact that Jarrett makes it all quite transformative. By 1975, tales of Jarrett’s high-wire solo recitals were legend. Once more, as he had as a member of Lloyd’s and Davis’s bands, the pianist found himself lauded in popular media like Rolling Stone, and sales of The Köln Concert began steady growth to the current total of approximately four million worldwide. At this date, the album has averaged sales of about 80,000 copies per year, while Davis’s Kind of Blue—frequently cited as the most popular jazz recording—has average annual sales of 75,000 over its 67-year history.
The lore surrounding The Köln Concert is dense, and Jarrett’s performance so much of a touchstone that it became a plot device in the dramatic 2025 film Köln 75, and the focus of a forthcoming documentary film that is currently seeking funding. The latter, which includes footage of the filmmakers being told by representatives of Jarrett and ECM label founder Manfred Eicher that neither party would participate in the film, is somewhat obsessed with finding the six-foot Bösendorfer “rehearsal” piano Jarrett was assigned in place of the 10-foot Bösendorfer 290 Imperial specified in the pianist’s contractual rider.
Much more about the two films and the background of the concert can be found in John Lewis’s typically erudite article in The Guardian.
One cinematic detail that is particularly appealing in that tale of The Köln Concert is the fact that Jarrett and Eicher listened to tapes of the performances as they howled south from Cologne on the A3 autobahn in the latter’s tiny Renault 4, headed for the next night’s concert in Baden, Switzerland. It’s no surprise that the drive south sealed the release of the show: in a rare 2008 interview, Eicher told me he frequently makes decisions about potential ECM releases as he drives. There’s something about the high-speed German highways that focuses his mind.
Given all that history, it’s hard to think of a jazz album as worthy of special reissue treatment as The Köln Concert. In addition to a digital download, the 50th-anniversary version is available on CD and as a two-LP set packaged in a tip-on gatefold jacket.
Over time, a number of reviews and retrospective articles have focused on the quality of the piano provided by teenaged concert promoter Vera Brandes. Exhausted by the daylong drive from his previous concert and not scheduled to perform until just before midnight, Jarrett was in no mood to settle for what he considered to be a substandard instrument, but Brandes eventually won him over. (In future years, as Jarrett’s reputation soared, promoters would pay a hefty toll for assigning unsuitable pianos for his performances.)
During the 46 years Jarrett played solo concerts—to say nothing of his trio and quartet performances over roughly the same period—he generated numerous tales of his quirky reactions to pianos. A veteran concert promoter I knew, who had booked artists throughout the United States, once relayed a story of Jarrett balking at the Bösendorfer Imperial assigned to him, only to perform using a much more modest instrument he spotted backstage under a protective tarp. When I was on the leadership team of the Ottawa Jazz Festival in the 1980s, we passed on at least one chance to book the notoriously finicky Jarrett.
It’s an issue that’s easily appreciated. Unlike drum kits or amplifiers, pianos can’t be easily swapped out. And Jarrett is by no means the only pianist to have some quirks regarding road instruments. For many years, the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa was home to one of the late Glenn Gould’s personal Steinways—made famous by the fact that it had once been dropped by movers and irreparably damaged, yet remained Gould’s favorite for recording. While at that institution, which frequently staged jazz concerts, the black Steinway became a kind of talisman for visiting pianists, to the point where at least two—Brad Mehldau and Ran Blake—extended their visits to the city so they could spend additional time with the Gould piano.
I will admit that I went onstage one night and laid hands on it myself—just for luck. Can’t hurt, right?
That night in Cologne, using two Neumann U67 condenser mikes and a Telefunken M5 recorder, ECM engineer Martin Wieland—who had also recorded the Jarrett concerts that became the November 1973 release Solo Concerts: Bremen / Lausanne—did what he could to compensate for the sound of what Jarrett had declared was an unplayable instrument. While it’s true the piano had some issues and quite likely influenced Jarrett’s performance—more on that later—it’s a far cry from the damaged RMI electric piano he made magic on with Davis at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. At that performance, Jarrett had used the RMI’s broken keys as a rhythmic device—some tasty lemonade, to be sure.
It’s great to have this epic recording in fresh packaging, with insightful liner notes by Thomas Steinfeld in the original German and an English translation.
Considering how omnipresent The Köln Concert was in dorm buildings after its original release on November 30, 1975, it made a lot of sense for me to combine the reissue with a pair of speakers any student would be pleased to have in their space today.
Retailing for US$600, CA$600, £299, or €338 per pair, and available in five colors—Golden Yellow, Caramel White, Black Ash, Chilly Blue, and Dark Walnut—DALI’s Kupid is targeted at listeners who are challenged by both cost and space. Just 9.6″H × 5.9″W × 7.8″D and weighing 6.4 pounds, the Kupid features a 4.5″ paper-and-wood-fiber woofer and a 1″ soft-dome tweeter. The tiny speaker has a rated sensitivity of 83dB and specified frequency response of 63Hz–25kHz (±3dB). Dennis Burger took a thorough look at the Kupid here, and you can find our complete National Research Council of Canada measurements here.
My space isn’t small—2400 cubic feet—but my couch sits about nine feet from the speakers, so I hoped the sound of Jarrett’s piano wouldn’t disappear into the room.
Stepping through the time portal to Cologne circa 1975, Jarrett announces his presence by copying the notes the concert hall played over its house PA to inform patrons that a performance was about to start. Later, the pianist claimed it was subconscious; some took it as a sign of him expressing his displeasure. It’s a tentative start, to be sure, but he quickly riffs on the notes of the alert and settles into what becomes the dominant approach for the night: strong, one- or two-chord vamps that provide a foundation for right-hand runs and filigrees. The following 26-minute improvisation is dominated by one vamp that shifts from A minor seventh to G major for almost 12 minutes and another six-minute vamp over an A-major theme. Ideas surface as he proceeds; he considers each one, briefly, then steps on with deliberation. At the six-minute mark he introduces some percussion, slapping the flanks of the piano, and within a minute he has moved into one of the fulsome, gospel-inflected movements that likely spurred so many purchases of the album. Twenty minutes in, the mood shifts again, leading to the ecstatic A-major section that closes the first half of the recital. Based around a six-note motif, the spiritually charged final section is another of the album’s touchstone segments—as rousing a piece of improvised music as you’re ever likely to hear.
The second half of the recital—divided into two sections of 15 and 19 minutes respectively—begins with authority and what sounds like joy. Perhaps the pianist has decided that the piano isn’t so bad, as long as you avoid the handful of keys at either end of the keyboard. Venture too far into either register, or play too forcefully, and the instrument will remind you why it had been assigned to rehearsals. That happens around the 11-minute mark of “Part IIa,” during one of Jarrett’s ecstatic builds, which invariably are accompanied by the musician’s guttural vocalizations. If you’ve ever seen the pianist in person you can likely imagine Jarrett rising off his piano bench and twisting his body as he plays.
After the prolonged ecstasy of the preceding piece, “Part IIb” follows a more linear path, with Jarrett building, building, building over a six-minute vamp in F# minor. Again, it’s one of those highly melodic, rhythmically repetitive segments of improvisation that is attractive even to casual listeners. The diehard fans will stay with Jarrett as he finally abandons the vamp and shifts into four minutes of much more challenging playing. The payoff is the rhapsodic theme that emerges around the 11-minute point. Highlighted by the sudden appearance of a seemingly fully-formed melody, it’s some of Jarrett’s most compelling playing.
Although labeled “Part IIc,” as if it’s yet another fully improvised piece, the encore is actually a very loose interpretation of Jarrett’s composition “Memories of Tomorrow,” which researchers say was only played one other time, by a Jarrett-led trio featuring bassist Gus Nemeth and drummer Paul Motian in Norway, circa 1969. It’s a gorgeous composition featuring interwoven melody lines, an approach Jarrett frequently employed for early compositions on albums as diverse as Facing You, his ECM debut, and Fort Yawuh, my favorite of the albums that the pianist’s so-called American quartet—Jarrett, Motian, Charlie Haden, and Dewey Redman—recorded for Impulse! Records.
I streamed a digital file of The Köln Concert (16‑bit/44.1kHz FLAC, ECM 1064/65) from my 16″ MacBook Pro to a Dayton Audio HTA200 integrated amplifier powering the Kupids via a pair of AudioQuest Type 5 cables, terminated with spade lugs. I listened to the album numerous times, reminding myself that this is music that never grows tiresome. Throughout my listening, at a range of volumes, the small Danish speakers delivered what Dennis called “hellacious bang for the buck.”
Looming over those experiences, of course, was the knowledge that I was hearing the Kupids doing a great job of transmitting a recording that is charmingly flawed; one of its charms being the lack of extreme top or bottom notes. What would the Kupids do with a recording of significantly greater substance?
For an answer I reached into my LP collection for an original copy of Jarrett’s sole release on Columbia Records, 1972’s Expectations (Columbia KG31580). It’s one of Jarrett’s most adventurous recordings in a pure jazz vein, and Jarrett himself has frequently cited the album as one of his favorite ventures.
In addition to Jarrett’s burgeoning American quartet, the musicians on Expectations include popular percussionist Airto Moreira (a fellow Davis band member) and the highly original guitarist Sam Brown, whose career ended tragically when he was just 38. On some pieces, the ensemble is joined by uncredited string and horn sections—an impossible-to-ignore indication that Jarrett’s career would take him far beyond jazz piano.
At the dawn of the ’70s, Columbia was in jazz expansion mode, so it snapped up Jarrett when he left Atlantic Records and put him in the studio to record a double album. But, as things will in the recording industry, the corporate wind shifted. Acoustic jazz was out; jazz-rock fusion was in. Shown the door by Columbia in addition to Jarrett were Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, and Charles Mingus. No wonder the episode is broadly known as a “bad day at Black Rock,” with reference to the nickname of Columbia’s New York City headquarters.
To push the Kupids I selected “Common Mama,” which features an uncredited horn section in addition to Jarrett, Redman, Haden, Motian, and Moreira, and cued it up on my Pro‑Ject Debut Pro turntable, which runs through an NAD PP 2e phono preamplifier to the HTA200. I was pleasantly surprised by the result. Based on the type of rousing, gospel-inspired rhythm Jarrett often used in his solo recitals, the song is a relatively straight-ahead composition featuring very prominent rhythm from Haden and Motian, with solo space for Redman and Jarrett. While there was no question that the horns sounded a bit constrained, the small speakers handled things much better than I anticipated. Even when I moved to the far side of my room, the Kupids punched well above their weight. It’s true that details began to disappear, but not to the extent I thought they would.
Considering how monetary values have shifted over the past 50 years, the Kupids would have retailed for around $100 in 1975. At that time, my bedroom speakers cost me just about that much. Believe me, they didn’t sound—or look—like this.
. . . James Hale
jamesh@soundstagenetwork.com
