KEITH JARRETT: The Köln Concert Remastered - Part 2 - HD

("To the woman that I loved,that I love, that I will love forever!") -
Keith Jarrett Koln Live Concert - January 24, 1975 - HQ the best audio -

00:00 - Part IIa -
15:10 - Part IIb -
33:10 - Part IIc -

(Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHx1XJsVPHE)

"I do not have a single seed when I start to play. It 's like starting from scratch. [...] The jazz is to let the light shine. Do not try to make it grow, let it be" [.........]
"The most important thing in my concert is the first note or the first four notes. If you have enough voltage, the rest of the concert is by itself, quite naturally [...] you just get to the core of this music and then plays alone." (Keith Jarrett)

"The Köln Concert is a recording by the pianist Keith Jarrett of solo piano improvisations performed at the Cologne Opera House in Cologne (German: Köln) on January 24, 1975 before a live audience.] It was released in the autumn of 1975 by the ECM Records label to critical acclaim and went on to become the best-selling solo album in jazz history, and the all-time best-selling piano album with sales of more than 3.5 million.
Preliminaries to the concert were not auspicious. The concert was organized by 18 year-old Vera Brandes, Germany's youngest concert promoter. At Jarrett's request, Brandes had selected a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano for the performance. However, there was some confusion by the opera house staff and instead they found another Bösendorfer piano backstage - a much smaller baby grand - and assuming it was the one requested placed it on the stage. Unfortunately, the error was discovered too late for the correct Bösendorfer to be delivered to the venue in time for the evening's concert. The piano they had was intended for rehearsals only and was in poor condition and required several hours of tuning and adjusting to make it playable.[5] The instrument was tinny and thin in the upper registers and weak in the bass register, and the pedals did not work properly. Consequently, Jarrett often used ostinatos and rolling left-hand rhythmic figures during his Köln performance to give the effect of stronger bass notes, and concentrated his playing in the middle portion of the keyboard. ECM Records producer Manfred Eicher later said: "Probably [Jarrett] played it the way he did because it was not a good piano. Because he could not fall in love with the sound of it, he found another way to get the most out of it."
Jarrett arrived at the opera house late in the afternoon and tired after an exhausting long drive from Zurich, Switzerland, where he had performed a few days earlier. He had not slept well in several nights and was in pain from back problems and had to wear a brace. After trying out the substandard piano and learning a replacement instrument was not available, Jarrett nearly refused to play and Brandes had to convince him to perform as the concert was scheduled to begin in just a few hours.[4] The concert took place at the unusually late hour of 11:30 PM following an earlier opera performance. This late-night time slot was the only one the administration would make available to Brandes for a jazz concert - the first one ever at the Köln Opera House. The show was completely sold out and the venue was filled to capacity with over 1400 people at a ticket price of 4 Deutsche Marks (about $5.00). Despite the obstacles, Jarrett's performance was enthusiastically received by the audience and the subsequent recording was acclaimed by critics and became an enormous commercial success. It remains his most popular recording and continues to sell well more than 35 years after its initial release.
The performance was recorded by ECM Records engineer Martin Weiland using a pair of Neumann U-67 vacuum-tube powered condenser microphones and a Telefunken M-5 portable tape machine. The recording is in three parts: lasting about 26 minutes, 34 minutes and 7 minutes respectively. As it was originally programmed for vinyl LP, the second part was split into sections labelled "IIa" and "IIb." The third part labelled "IIc" was actually the final piece, a separate encore.