"Solo concerts are about the most psychologically revealing self-analysis I can imagine," jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, born in 1945, said in an interview.
When he indulged in his grandiose improvisations on the grand piano in concert, it didn't feel great to him, but rather, as he once confessed, like being naked on stage.
This soulful quality of his music, combined with its great tonal beauty and accessibility, explains the great, long-lasting success of the musician and at the same time describes his vulnerability.
It throws the first stone at Keith Jarrett, who in 1975, when he gave the legendary concert in the Cologne Opera House on January 24, did not own a flokati and did not drink tea.
I did both and remember
that I first heard Keith Jarrett's "The Cologne Concert" in 1982 with my friend as we drove north in his old R4 on our way to the sea through endless avenues, windows rolled down, blinded by the sunlight filtering through the canopy, happily in an endless summer.
From my passenger seat, through the rusted floor, I watched the tarmac fly beneath us until I felt dizzy.
We loved this music, like Gill Scott-Heron, like Tchaikovsky, like Joni Mitchell a little later.
From my passenger seat, through the rusted floor, I watched the tarmac fly beneath us until I felt dizzy.
We loved this music, like Gill Scott-Heron, like Tchaikovsky, like Joni Mitchell a little later.
From my passenger seat, through the rusted floor, I watched the tarmac fly beneath us until I felt dizzy.
We loved this music, like Gill Scott-Heron, like Tchaikovsky, like Joni Mitchell a little later.
The dancer and choreographer Trajal Harrell is younger than me, he was only two years old when Jarrett left Zurich in an R4 for Cologne.
But we both grew up in a youth deeply shaped by musical experiences, perhaps the first generation that loved jazz rock, jazz, funk, pop, folk just as much as classical music and was allowed to love it.
Harrell opened his residency as a choreographer at Zurich's Schauspielhaus with his piece, named after the music, The Köln Concert, and has toured with it ever since.
At the weekend, the piece in the sold-out Hebbel Theater in Berlin marked the end of the "Tanz im August" festival.
One of the most beautiful songs of all time
Harrell introduced four songs by Joni Mitchell to the half-hour of Keith Jarrett's tunes.
Unlike the guitar-accompanied pieces, The Last Time I saw Richard, with its piano accompaniment, is the ideal transition to Jarrett's music.
It is one of the most beautiful songs of all time and tells the story of the disillusioned artist in the post-romantic phase of his existence: "Richard got married to a figure skater / And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator / And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on / And all the house lights left up bright".
This is how Trajal Harrell begins: the audience is seated in bright light and the choreographer, beginning to dance alone, at the front right of the stage, looks over the audience.
But sometimes he also looks at us: with his own introspection, which has nothing negative about it, but which unmistakably points out that we are watching a personality created for the theater at the moment of acting.
It is a melancholy that is both highly individually expressed and universal, which Harrell and his six dancers – two women and four men – exude in their alternating and sometimes overlapping solos.
They express grief, pain over failure, over losses, over futility, transience, decay, despair perhaps also over being trapped in one's own body, in one's own identity.
Harrell's language is as eruptive as it is simple: trembling, almost pleading hands, raised arms, then a seated dance, feet tucked up again and again, as if the floor were burning hot.
What you can observe is something very important that characterizes all great dance:
Namely that the specific kinetic energy flowing through the body also leads to a corresponding facial expression.
With Trajal Harrell and his ensemble, this makes a decisive contribution to the impression of authenticity.
What you see is the absolute dance penetration of your own stage personality.
And the effect blows you away.
Apart from how subtle, flowing and delicate, how wild and brutal and without regard for oneself, the musical impulses are implemented as light as a feather, without one ever wondering who is actually following whom here, apart from the fact that nobody else is Harrell would like to be able to 'dance' this music, as they used to say.
Even more impressive is how he starts with the point of Jarrett's "psychologically revealing self-analysis" and is in no way inferior to him in radicalism.
You just have to see how Harrell saves music that we haven't touched in a long time, how he transforms movements that we thought were outdated and lost into something unseen, something that touches on our current attitude to life, our feeling of being post-romantic, burdened many times, been there, done that, that you can even marry a figure skater, give her a dishwasher and a coffee maker and still be not immune to finding yourself in front of the television with a lot of beer in a senselessly brightly lit house, in your late forties, Mid fifties.
And what's the only thing that could save you from that?
To penetrate oneself with full force, to disassemble and reassemble oneself again and again, like Harrell himself as a dancer, his dance.
Trajal Harrell is making a guest appearance with The Köln Concert on September 1st and 2nd at the Wiesbaden Biennale.