Köln 75

As statisticians and music fiends will know, the best-selling piano album of all time is the live recording of Keith Jarett’s 1975 improv jazz concert in Cologne. 50 years after the legendary night, Israeli-born/US-based filmmaker Ido Fluk (The Ticket) decides to tell the story of how it all came about and how it nearly didn’t – from the perspective of teenage concert promoter Vera Brandes.

Down the line, her dentist father will describe Vera as his greatest disappointment, but by means of breaking the fourth wall, the film informs its viewers that this is what musicians call a “false start” (including a nod to Bob Dylan by A Complete Unknown actor Michael Chernus).

Vera (Mala Emde) is still in high school, sneaking off to an ice cream parlour that doubles as a jazz venue at night, when her obstinacy lands her her first job: organising German tour dates for international musicians passing through Europe. After seeing Keith Jarrett (John Magaro) perform at a festival in Berlin, the young woman is hellbent on bringing the genre-defying pianist to Cologne, but in the hours leading up to the show, everything threatens to fall apart.

As the majority of the film focuses on Brandes and what is at stake for her, the introduction of a storyline surrounding Jarrett’s health problems, his friend and producer Manfred Eichner (Alexander Scheer) and journalist Michael Watts (Chernus) comes rather late in the game to have an equally potent impact on the viewer. This is somewhat disappointing, because even as the artist’s point of view may be the more common one, it is no less interesting, and because Scheer and Magaro offer the most inspired performances.

Köln 75 operates on a humorous tone, which works well enough for the most part, coaxing a few smiles and chuckles here and there, but as the comedy should reach its peak in the chaos surrounding the untuned and subpar piano, Jarrett refuses to play on, the film fails to push itself across the finish line by wavering. The script isn’t concrete enough as to why some of the proposed alternatives don’t work, why Brandes’s previously established stubbornness yields to an obtuse secretary of all things, why a half-baked speech is suddenly enough to change Jarrett’s mind.

With its unusual approach to chronicling this incisive event in jazz history, The Girl from Cologne is more Saturday Night than any musician’s biopic. The result is entertaining, but ultimately a little unspectacular, as it fails to convincingly capture the magic of spontaneous creation.

Selina Sondermann

Köln 75 does not have a release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Berlin Film Festival coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Berlin Film Festival website here.