As a film director, every day you come to set you’re faced with a broken piano,” says Ido Fluk, the Israeli film-maker behind the award-winning new movie Köln 75. “There’s just an endless list of problems that arise when you shoot a film.
“The cars are late, the actors are wrong, the extras are not there, the police show up to shut you down, it starts to rain… it’s endless.”
A “broken piano” might seem like a strange metaphor for the typical troubles of a movie shoot, but it makes sense when you consider Köln 75.
The story follows jazz pianist Keith Jarrett when he came to perform at the Cologne Opera House in 1975 – a concert organised by an ambitious German 18-year-old named Vera Brandes, who hired out the 1,400-capacity venue at huge personal financial risk.
Famed for his very physical, improvisational style, Jarrett ordered a Bösendorfer Imperial piano for the concert.
When he arrived, he was met with an antiquated baby grand rehearsal piano, out of tune, with malfunctioning pedals.
Jarrett refused to play, until Brandes – thankfully – persuaded him otherwise. The resulting improvised gig was recorded and released as The Köln Concert, which became the best-selling solo jazz album in history.
“This story explains why you need problems to make art interesting,” continues Fluk (best known for 2016’s The Ticket, with Downton Abbey star Dan Stevens).
“Usually the problems are what make art stand out, and especially in an age where we use AI to chase perfection.
“There’s this quest for perfection right now. I think his story is a good reminder that perfection is really boring; in the defects, in the problems, in the broken instruments that we play on as artists, good art is created.”
Director Ido Fluk at the Cologne premiere of the movie Köln 75Getty Images
Speaking over Zoom from New York, where he’s lived since leaving Israel 20 years ago, Fluk wasn’t a big jazz aficionado before he started the project, but that soon changed.
“Now I feel at home in jazz,” he says, telling me that genre “is making a comeback” and namechecking contemporary artists such as Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and Belgium’s Nala Sinephro.
But did Jarrett really create one of the most important live jazz albums ever? “It’s a great piece of music, but he played better music,” he shrugs. “I think Keith has better albums.” Yet there was something about Jarrett’s achievements in Cologne that transcended a typical concert.
“He’s playing against the piano, he’s wrestling with the instrument,” says Fluk. “It’s such a small acoustic box, and he’s got to project sound all the way to the back of the theatre, and it’s a very, very large theatre.
So to make sure that the nosebleeds are hearing what he’s doing, he’s got to bang, and banging makes it rhythmical. And so the music becomes more accessible. At least that’s the theory that I connect with the most.”
Playing Jarrett is the Ohio-raised actor John Magaro, a beacon of American independent cinema these past years, with appearances in films such as First Cow, Past Lives, September 5 and last year’s art heist tale The Mastermind. While Jarrett was a mix of German and Slovenian descent, Magaro also grew up with mixed heritage. Jewish on his mother’s side, his father is Italian-American.
John Magaro in September 5 about the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre[Missing Credit]
“I went to Hebrew school, I was barmitzvahed,” he explains, reporting that Catholicism wasn’t such a thing in their household. “My mother certainly took the reins on religion.”
Going into the project, the 43-year-old actor was stuck by the way Jarrett improvised and changed his sets every night at this period of his musical career. “I mean, you can’t help but respect that. It’s bold. For him, it was an experiment, too. He didn’t continue to do that throughout his career. He does go back to more traditional jazz after that, but that was a unique moment in time for jazz, and I’ve got to respect his courage for doing that.”
Fluk was initially concerned with casting Jarrett. “Keith is so big, and it can become a caricature so easily – with the way he moves and the way he looked back then. And if John is known for anything, it’s just being an honest actor. He never overdoes it. He’s all about presence, honesty, just being in the place under the skin of the character, and of course, he also goes missing inside these people that he portrays. When he took it on, I think it took a lot of courage.” Somehow, it worked. “You just forget that it’s John Magaro…You’re like, ‘He’s Keith Jarrett now.’”
Magaro, who had experience of piano playing from his earlier years, worked with award-winning pianist Scott Gentile to perfect his keyboard skills and learn “the mannerisms of Keith”, as he puts it. “He has a very specific way of playing, which could become a parody if you don’t dissect it in the right way. And a big part of our time together, Scott and I, was dissecting the way he played and why he did what he did. That was months of work, to figure that out.”
While the 81-year-old Jarrett remains unconnected with the film, Fluk spoke extensively with Vera Brandes – now aged 70 and played in the film by the German rising star Mala Emde. “My producer called her up and he said, ‘We want to make a film about you’ and she said, ‘Finally!’ It was a story about a very important woman. Without Vera Brandes, there would be no Cologne concert, and yet she never really got the credit that she deserved, and she never really heard a thank you from anyone. She has never seen a dime from this.”
Ironically, the idea of Jarrett coming to Europe to fine-tune his art feels like Fluk coming to Germany and Poland to seek financiers on the project. “The story of Keith Jarrett in the Seventies is that he had to go to tour in Europe, and a lot of jazz greats were in Europe because it felt like in the States there wasn’t much of an audience for them to play to. And I think in the United States, independent film, the art house, everyone is doing the same thing. There’s definitely a slowdown in the market here, and the business is becoming more international.”
Fluk, who was born in Tel Aviv and raised in Paris, has the same wandering soul that Jarrett boasts. After studying at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, he returned to Israel to shoot his first feature, 2011’s Never Too Late, the story of a young Israeli who returns after an eight-year absence, taking a road-trip across the country. The film became the first-ever crowd-founded film in Israeli cinema history. Keen to show a different side to his birthplace, as he said at the time, “I think that Israel’s depiction in the media or the way it’s perceived by those who are familiar with it is often superficial.”
Whether he will return to Israel again to make movies remains to be seen. “I look forward for my projects to take me all over the world,” he says. “It’s the thing that makes making art interesting.” That said his Jewish heritage has not been forgotten; he is currently working on another real-life story – this time telling of the final days of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, an American Jewish couple executed at the height of the Cold War for conspiracy to commit espionage.
Developing it with James Schamus, the writer-producer behind Brokeback Mountain, he’s already called it a “really important story about American Jews and the way they were perceived in America”, but beyond that, Fluk is not ready to spill the beans just yet. “I’m a pressure cooker,” he grins, “and until something’s ready, I’m keeping [it] tight under the lid.” Hopefully, whenever he gets to film it, there will be no broken pianos to contend with.
Köln 75 is in cinemas on June 5
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.