Hippies vs. Punks: Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert (1975)

I read in the little booklet that accompanies PUNK 45: KILL THE HIPPIES! KILL YOURSELF! THE AMERICAN NATION DESTROYS ITS YOUNG, UNDERGROUND PUNK IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, VOL. 1. 1973-1980 that no wave grew out of the void left when the major labels snatched up the CBGB bands like Television, Patti Smith Group, the Ramones and Talking Heads and sent them out on the road to promote albums. This got me thinking that I should devote a post to Theoretical Girls, the Glenn Branca and Jeff Lohn no wave group extraordinaire. The tie-in being that my friend and co-worker Tony, who I mentioned in last week's post in connection with a live performance by Lee Ranaldo, suggested that I acquire the definitive album, Theoretical Girls: Theoretical Record (2002), one afternoon when we were in a record store that has been closed now for several years.

But I couldn't stomach an immersion in a lo-fi sonic assault. Instead, I have been listening all week to my collection of Keith Jarrett solo recordings. From quiet electronica to the acoustic piano, that is all I have been able to muster for myself in December.

Then the other day, after working my way through Hamburg '72,  Concerts and The Impulse Years: 1973-1974, The Köln Concert (1975) came over my speakers, and it was as if the spirit of the post-revolutionary Hippie appeared before me fully formed.

I had no idea that The Köln Concert is by far Keith Jarrett's most successful record, not to mention the most successful solo jazz album of all time. The Köln Concert is right up there -- which is hard for me to believe -- with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959).

The story of the The Köln Concert is well known. Jarrett had just driven from Switzerland. His back was killing him; he was wearing a brace. When he arrived at the opera house in Cologne where the gig was he learned that the piano he requested was not there; instead, a smaller, out of tune practice piano was found backstage and frantic attempts were made to make it listenable. The upper and lower keys were hard to hear. This molded the performance that Jarrett was to deliver because it forced him to play predominantly with the middle keys; also, the spacey, wafting New Age sound was partly a result of using a double mic, which one reviewer commented made the piano sound like it was made out of five stories of glass.

What we have is a faithful mirror of the Zeitgeist 1975. Improvised before a packed house of Hippies at midnight, The Köln Concert would create a whole new genre, New Age. It reminds me of the Windam Hill Records sound so prevalent in the late '70s and into the mid-'80s. It is the sound of the Hippie turning her back on revolution and settling down to a solidly bourgeois lifestyle.

This is not to say it is bad record. I think it is an amazing document, particularly "Part IIb," the third segment of the double LP. There was a space of time in the middle '70s when the Hippies and Punks were incredibly creative. And there is some really good writing online about The Köln Concert. Kind Of Weird: How The Köln Concert Made Keith Jarrett A Pop Star by John Lingan manages in the last two paragraphs to conjure up the spirit of Jarrett's January 1975 Cologne improv:

But what a marvelous, bizarre thing that an artist like this can become so popular, even for a moment, embraced by people, like my dad, who barely messed with jazz besides. I first discovered Köln in our basement, among Dad's old LPs, sandwiched among Ten Years After, Grin, and Mountain. I was a young teenager, intrigued by the spare album art and curious as to how Dad could like something so New-Agey. When I listen to it now, I get the same feeling I had the first time: I feel stronger, smarter, more inspired. It works when I'm sad, when I'm joyful, when I'm driving or falling asleep. 

In David Foster Wallace's 1989 story "Girl With Curious Hair," the unnamed sociopathic narrator goes with his dirtbag friends to a solo Keith Jarrett concert in the early '80s. The friends drop acid, and one explains that the improvisation "smelled like old velvet in a trunk in an attic, or like vitamins, or medicine, or morning … [It] resembled weak sunlight through ice." That's true enough, but I prefer the brevity of the awful narrator, who's never heard Jarrett's music before and who, sober, declares with great enthusiasm that the show is "punkrock." The Köln Concert will remain ever so.

If it is Punk, it is a quiet kind of Punk, which is the Punk that I prefer to listen to as another year winds down. Walking to work yesterday in the dark, I decided to leave my iPod in my jacket pocket and trek the two miles to the office listening to the unusually calm sounds of the morning traffic. It made me realize, a la Gertrude Stein, that there is no there there. Maybe that is the point of quiet, to remind us that everything is empty; or, if there is a there there it is not the there that we think is there. The realization is that the there we thought was there is not there and either nothing is there or something so different it might as well be nothing is there.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #40

One of the nice things about the about the old location of the local where I work is that it was a convenient walking distance to the Douglass Truth Library. I would often go there during my lunch break and sit in the comfortable chairs and read the New York Times and maybe doze off for a few minutes. I would also browse the music compact discs. One album I discovered was II by The Psychic Paramount. It sounded distinctly different. On the band's Wikipedia page the genres listed are experimental rock, noise rock and psychedelic rock. There's definitely a No Wave/Glenn Branca vibe to it, but it also has a Hardcore/Flipper-like edge.

This morning I heard the last track off II, "N5 Coda," as I suffered up the last hill on my second eight-mile run in as many days (I'm trying to get ready for a 10K next Sunday), and I was reminded how good The Psychic Paramount is.

My cohort at the university all went on to be doctors and lawyers and journalists and professors and IT professionals. I am the odd man out in that I am a secretary, a.k.a., office worker or support staff personnel. This letter, number 40, like last week's, is addressed to my friend Niall; it is devoted to my friendship with his older brother who had just made his mark professionally as a reporter. Though written while drunk, as all these letters were when I first arrived in New York City in my early twenties, it nonetheless contains an honest assessment of aspiration and achievement. The last paragraph is a young man's farewell to friendship.

Spring 1989 

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, which means go up to a mountain, on top of a mountain, and say what it is that you want to say. I heard about Colum's successes tonight from Terri, how he's got stuff printed in the WASHINGTON POST and NEWSWEEK and the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, and man I'll tell you, I feel so happy about it, about the deservedness of Colum's successes, so clean and unthreatened and peaceful and devoted, that I almost feel bad about it: one, because I really haven't written to him and provided him with moral support; and two, because it rnakes me realize how unenergetic and unrisky and scared my life really is. Colum had something to do, and he did it, which is what it's all about, isn't it? But he did it alone, and I feel like I kinda stopped being his friend. I never wrote and he never wrote and I never called and he never called, and on and on, dribbling into laziness and unappreciation. The last time I talked to Colum was in January at your place. I remember getting stoned all of us together the first night you were back from LA when Mark and Gail were there; I remember the football game in the parking lot; I remember driving him in my VW bus over the Bay Bridge while he snuggled in the back with Terri wrapped in a sleeping bag; and I remember just me and him alone in the Oak Street apartment -- you had gone over to sleep at Eve's house; Terri and Mark had left to go to a few clubs -- listening to Bob Dylan. That night it was like this: the two old men together, too old to go out and rock with the kiddies, old and forlorn and fundamentally lonely, alone. We chatted for a bit, talked about I don't know what, and then decided to turn in. We walked into your room, shut off the lights, got into bed, put our heads on the pillows, and fell asleep. -- Two old pals alone together and going to bed, no girlfriends to go over and sleep with, no bars to hop, nothing to do but say good night and go to bed. I felt like my dead granddad -- vulnerable and pure and teetering and tired. But none of it bad, not in the least; in fact, very  good, totally honest and at home, a kinda of feeling I don't even feel with my own family, except for maybe my father. Oh, well. I can remember more if I tried, but that's not the point. The point is that I feel shitty about not taking more care for Colum. 

I think what happened in the last two or three years is that Colum figured out what it is that he wanted to do, and if not wanted to do, what he should do, and should do in the sense of really doing it. We're still wafting around in early twenties uncertainty and fear. He had no time for such shit. And he's right. Hopefully we'll find the energy a few years from now to make the kind of choices he did. 

It's not all my fault and it's not all your fault and it's not all Colum's fault. It has something to do with the fact that the earth is the dirt of sadness and that time fades away. -- There will be no more games of One Hand on the porch at night as the black-and-white television blabbers on the kitchen chair; there will be no more hash browns cooked in olive oil on electric stoves in 1985; there will be no more Socrates discussed over coffee and beer and hot dogs as Leslie complains about too much noise; there will be no more pisses in toilets in nooks in apartments on Dana Street. And no matter how much I'm accused of goldbricking, and no matter how much I'm chastised for backward looking and lauding the past, there is one thing I will always be when it comes to things like this, and that is right.