Corny in a good way, Köln 75 (aka Cologne 75) tells the strange but true story behind the story of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, to this day the biggest selling solo jazz album of all time. The album is just Jarrett improvising on a piano in a cavernous concert hall. Unlike the film, which is a winning mix of two familiar tropes as the triumph over adversity drama meets the can-do of the let’s-do-the-show-right-here musical.
Mala Emde plays the young woman who made it all happen, German jazz enthusiast Vera Brandes. We meet Vera aged 16 forcing herself on British jazzer Ronnie Scott after a gig. Impressed by her chutzpah, and possibly also casting an eye at her tits, Scott calls Vera’s know-all teenage bluff by asking her to organise a German tour for him. She’s a schoolgirl, she’s never done this sort of thing before and this is clearly a put-up-or-shut-up strategy on Scott’s part. It won’t be easy – she has to do it all in English, not Vera’s native language, she doesn’t even have access to a phone, plus there’s the cold disapproval of her stern father to reckon with, who’s worried about his “jazz bunny” daughter.
It is an unlikely story but a true one. Vera Brandes really did organise the Cologne concert. Which after the Ronnie Scott warm-up intro, is what most of the film is about – obstacles including a truculent, unhappy and unwell Jarrett travelling in a cramped car with his manager, a shortage of the necessary money to hire the Cologne concert hall and a grand piano that goes missing in action at the last minute.
It’s a testament to how well the film is made – take a bow New York-based director/writer Ido Fluk – that it’s a tense journey even though we know the outcome. The album exists, self-evidently, so the concert happened and it all worked out well in the end.
This comes down pretty much to Emde’s performance – she makes Vera bright, enthusiastic and driven without being unbearable. We want her to succeed. Michael Chernus pops up now and again as a journalist explaining the more esoteric aspects of the jazz scene in cutaways reminiscent of those bit explaining arcane finance in The Big Short. And John Magaro again disappears into his character as Jarrett – pissy but dedicated and once inside the music transported to who knows where, but certainly away from the real world of back pain and bad food.
It’s a two hander in many respects – some irony there – with Vera soloing in the first half and the action shifting decisively to Jarrett once he’s been introduced around the midway mark.
It’s inspired using Scott as a gateway into this story and Fluk drops in other names from the era, often from the British jazz and jazz-rock scene – Ralph Towner, Ian Carr’s Nucleus, Barbara Thompson – to lend an authentic feel. It’s easy to see this as a high water mark for that style of jazz – the scene was jumping – but again and again we’re reminded that many people of the time saw it as “museum music”.
The Cologne album was the leg-up Jarrett needed to get away from being the guy who “plays piano for Miles”, and this is the film that the album needs to celebrate its status. It canonises it, but with a cheeriness and straightforwardness you might not expect with jazz as the subject matter.
Its tightrope skill is to steer a course that jazzers will appreciate and non-fans will easily be able to follow. It’s sincere but also good fun, not a word too often associated with the most intensely introspective of musical styles.
Köln 75 – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
