Years ago, Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales discussed Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, David Bowie’s “Heroes”, and Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, in an episode about how staying in your comfort zone isn’t always the best option and that disruption can feed creativity. David Epstein makes those same points in Inside the Box and covers that same concert:
Eighteen-year-old Vera Brandes had not intended to make music history on the night of January 24, 1975. She planned only to put on a sold-out concert at the opera house in Cologne, Germany.
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At seventeen, when she learned that a concert in Cologne featuring a well-known band from America was about to fall through, she stepped in to save it, finalizing contracts, securing a venue, and mustering promotion at the last minute. It played to a sold-out crowd of eight hundred, and thus she became a concert promoter.
Next, Brandes started her own concert series. She called it New Jazz in Cologne.
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She reserved the Cologne Opera House for a Friday night, which meant the concert would be late—eleven p.m.—because it would have to begin after that night’s opera.
To allow anyone interested to attend, she kept the tickets cheap; some went for four deutsche marks, or about $ 1.50. When the day of the show rolled around, all 1,432 seats had been sold.
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Jarrett had performed in Lausanne, Switzerland, the night before, and had to drive the four hundred miles with his producer, Manfred Eicher, overnight to get to Cologne. Neither had slept, and Jarrett was wearing a brace due to persistent back pain.
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They also wanted to check out the piano, which Jarrett had specifically requested: a nine-and-a-half-foot-long Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano.
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The piano was sitting on the orchestra lift, a platform in the orchestra pit that can be raised up to the level of the stage. Brandes found someone who could raise the platform, and Jarrett tested a few keys. Then Eicher tested a few keys. Brandes could hear immediately that something was wrong. Eicher walked over and told her that if she couldn’t find another piano, the concert was off.
It wasn’t just that the piano was wildly out of tune. It was the wrong piano. In addition to being two and a half feet shorter than the Bösendorfer Imperial, it actually had fewer keys in the bass range.
There were two Bösendorfer pianos in the arts complex that included the opera house, and a transport company had moved the wrong one.
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The tuner was able to get the middle register in order and the bass register playable, but the upper register was still a problem. The first tinkling notes mimicked the pre-concert bell that ushered the audience to their seats—an unusual start that elicited a giggle from the crowd. Over the next hour of improvisation, Jarrett stuck to the middle of the piano for extended periods. Instead of relying on the full range of notes, he wielded shifts in the loudness and softness of the music to craft an emotional sonic journey, moving between driving rhythms and fragile whispers. He focused on ostinatos, or repetitive patterns of notes, out of which recurring themes blossomed. Combined with steady rhythmic changes, it gave the playing a gorgeous, ethereal quality. In contrast to the sprawling “free jazz” improvisation that was common in Europe at the time, Jarrett spent long stretches playing a few chords with his left hand (one ten-minute span alternates between two adjacent chords, one minor and one major) while his right hand played the part of soloist, improvising groove passages, often in a narrow pitch range but with widely varying rhythms and recurring elements. The smaller piano was not meant to project sound that could reach the balconies, so Jarrett had to press the keys (especially in the bass register) aggressively. He occasionally supplemented that with a novel percussive element: stamping his foot against the pedal without pressing it down. Here and there, he added a well-timed hoot of apparent delight.
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Even after Jarrett had agreed to play, he and Eicher almost dismissed the recording team. But since the sound engineers were already there, they let them proceed, assuming nothing would come of it. Instead, the Cologne performance was released later that year, using the German name of the city in the album title: The Köln Concert. Jarrett’s improvisations that night were too long for radio. But when people heard the album, they loved it. The repetitive elements and anchored improvisations are thrilling but easy to follow, even for a complete novice. It immediately began to spread by word of mouth or by people hearing it played in record stores and asking if they could buy it. It started selling… and selling, and selling, until it had sold millions of copies in all. That recording, of the undersized, partly tuned, sticky-pedaled piano, eventually became the bestselling solo piano album of all time.
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“What happened with this piano was that I was forced to play in what was—at the time—a new way,” he said. “Somehow I felt I had to bring out whatever qualities this instrument had. And that was it.” Decades later, referring to a different performance (his best, he felt), he told Keyboard Magazine: “When I find a piano that has this ‘imperfect’ character, it’s actually much more to deal with—and I mean that in a good sense—than a ‘perfect’ piano.”
Jarrett is hinting at what psychologist Catrinel Tromp has termed the Green Eggs and Ham model of creativity—the paradoxical idea that “working with constraints can yield more creative outputs.” The model gets its name from the origin of the seminal children’s book by Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), which began when Bennett Cerf at Random House bet Geisel fifty dollars that he couldn’t write a children’s book using just fifty words.
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In the mid-1950s, the typical reading primer for children was, as the journalist and novelist John Hersey wrote after serving on a school-study council: an “antiseptic little sugar-book showing how Tom and Betty have fun at home and school… uniform, bland, idealized and terribly literal.” With that in mind, the head of Houghton Mifflin’s education division invited Geisel to dinner. He gave Geisel a list of vocabulary words for kids and asked him to write a book for six-and seven-year-olds using no more than 225 words from the list.
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The list exasperated Geisel. “There are no adjectives!” he complained to his wife. In fine Seussian form, he compared it to “trying to make a strudel without any strudels.” So he looked over the list again, and decided that the first two rhyming words he found would form the title of the book, and he’d proceed from there. Thus, The Cat in the Hat was born, transforming contemporary children’s literature. Like Jarrett, Geisel was given limited sounds to work with, so he had to focus more intently on exploring rhythm, quickening the words as the plot quickened. He found it extremely difficult, but also extremely generative.
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As a prominent creativity study put it, given complete freedom, our very strong urge is to follow the “path of least resistance.”
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A related phenomenon is known as the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the instinct of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available. “Without constraints,” as one creativity researcher eloquently put it, “composition takes place in a cul-de-sac of the customary.”
I should probably read Tim Harford’s Messy, on this subject. He shares some of his sources:
Paul Trynka’s biography of David Bowie is Starman. Sasha Frere-Jones has a fine profile of Brian Eno in the New Yorker, but my main source is my own discussions with Brian.
Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt printed their collection of oblique strategies — aphorisms for creativity — on cards in 1975.