‘Köln 75’ Review: A Legendary Jazz Concert Turned into a Mildly Charming Movie

The German film KÖLN 75 presents a curious dichotomy. It focuses, quite explicitly, on an artistic-historical event considered avant-garde in its time, yet the movie recreates it in a manner that—aside from a few details—is strikingly traditional. Something there doesn’t quite click, or at the very least feels like an unexpected choice, since the relationship between form and content ends up being minimal, if not outright contradictory. What the film recounts is a relatively minor anecdote within the larger artistic event around which it’s built—Keith Jarrett’s concert in Cologne, which became the best-selling solo jazz album in history—and it tells it in a way that has little to do with the musician’s aesthetic universe. Put differently: formally, at least, the film has almost nothing “jazz-like” about it.

It’s true that Jarrett’s concert reached massive, non-specialist audiences, but director Ido Fluk frames and explains what the pianist was doing at the time as the height of artistic vanguardism: a man sitting at the piano, improvising out of thin air, without any familiar standard to lean on and without a band to engage with. In the movie, however, Jarrett’s music seems to drift into the background compared to the adventure being narrated—an adventure that’s pleasant and charming on its own terms, but that could more or less unfold around any other artistic excuse.

The story KÖLN 75 tells is that of Vera Brandes (Mala Emde), an upbeat, lively teenager from Cologne who ends up accepting an offer from jazz musician and promoter Ronnie Scott to become his booking agent—the person who finds, negotiates and secures performance venues for artists. Vera, the daughter of a stern local dentist who wants nothing more than for her to follow in his footsteps, throws herself into the 1970s music world—mostly jazz, with some rock—and, with her circle of friends, becomes a sort of local mini-celebrity, even appearing in magazines. What for her is pure fun, fantasy, and a way of life is slowly turning into a looming family problem.

The real anecdote behind the film takes place a bit later, when Vera is 18 (yes, she started at 16), becomes fascinated with Jarrett (played by John Magaro) after seeing him perform in Berlin, and organizes a concert for him in Cologne—one riddled with complications and mishaps that are now part of the lore of a performance that became mythical and has been dissected endlessly by fans. Fluk tells all of this in a tone that oscillates between innocence and enthusiasm, as if he were making a film about Beatlemania or chronicling the story of a rebellious girl clashing with the era’s status quo, but in a way that feels both naïve and somewhat trivial. If KÖLN 75 aligns form and content anywhere, it’s in the sense that the film seems told from the perspective of someone not much older than 18.

The film is gentle, light, occasionally charming, and includes moments in which the director playfully breaks the fourth wall, allowing actors to speak directly to the camera. Whether they’re recounting episodes from Vera’s life or providing context about the contemporary music scene, or about jazz history and Jarrett’s significance as a solo performer, what Fluk does is far from avant-garde and has little to do with the pianist’s far more radical and intimate artistic pursuit. At best, these are small comic flourishes—many delivered by a music critic played with gusto by Michael Chernus—that give the film a veneer of modernity. But at heart, the family tangles, the romantic detours and the chaos of organizing the show all remain firmly within the boundaries of a made-for-streaming biopic.

There’s a striking coincidence—even in the title—between KÖLN 75 and the Argentine film BILL 79, by Mariano Galperín, centered on the curiosities and odd situations sparked by Bill Evans’s visit to the small city of San Nicolás in 1979. It’s not a matter of theft or imitation—Brandes’s story has long been known thanks to her association with the concert—but there is something undeniably similar in the impulse to build a film around a quirky, secondary anecdote orbiting a jazz-related artistic moment. In fact, Galperín’s film makes far riskier narrative choices that, though not always successful, get much closer to a genuinely “jazzy” spirit in form.

In the end, KÖLN 75 is a simple, slightly goofy and extremely accessible movie that turns everything surrounding that legendary concert into a pleasant little story and not much more. Fluk gets very little mileage out of the Jarrett character, whom the always-measured Magaro plays as a man full of suffering, somewhere between melancholy and irritation. And beyond a few seconds of performance, we hear almost nothing of what the musician actually played on that tour and at that concert. The free, improvised, avant-garde part —the essence of it all— Fluk leaves for us to seek out on our own. What his film does is wrap it in a series of anecdotes that, with a few exceptions, are mostly trivial and offer, at best, some historical context for the show. And not much more than that.