Köln 75 review – how a legendary jazz-improv show was cajoled into being by a German teenager

Watchable biopic charts how an 18-year-old German booked the sickly American pianist Keith Jarrett for what became a landmark concert Here is a niche drama about one of the most important chapters in the history of experimental jazz. It is however watchable, well acted and avoids the music-movie cliches – though I could have done without the fourth-wall-breaking lectures about the nature of jazz improvisation. They were perhaps inspired by similar setpieces in Adam McKay’s financial crisis movie The Big Short , and are heavy-handed and condescending in just the same way. John Magaro plays Keith Jarrett, the great jazz pianist and former Miles Davis collaborator who in the mid-70s found himself on a gruelling European solo tour, improvising every night for the ecstatic jazz faithful who were more plentiful in Europe than the US, while struggling with depression and back pain. Mala Emde plays the amazingly precocious 18-year-old Vera Brandes, a kid from Cologne who had become a jazz promoter after being inspired by an encounter with Ronnie Scott, and rebelling against her grumpily conservative dentist father, played here by Ulrich Tukur. Continue reading...