KOLN 75

TEENAGER FINDS FREEDOM IN JAZZ MUSIC BEFORE THE DAY BEGINS

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Jazz music liberally follows a standard until finding even greater freedom.

Vera Brandes is a typical teenager exploring her boundaries by sneaking out at night to take in Jazz shows in Cologne (Koln) Germany. The trick was sneaking back home in time to have breakfast with her parents so they could see her off to high school in the morning.

Then a chance encounter at a jazz club during one of these secret night outs leads to her promoting a concert tour for the Ronnie Scott Trio.

Director Ido Fluk oscillates narrative devices in tempo with the Jazz standard and the greater freedom found by Jazz musicians in the film about the legendary piano concert by Keith Jarrett in Koln 75 (2025).

The teenage angst narrative intertwines with the freedom of Jazz, with the complicated motivations of jazz musicians providing an extra dynamic in this biopic.

Fluk initially puts the camera inside the home of Brandes’ family to explore how the father, a dentist with a practice in the basement of the family home, and the rest of the family deal with a teenager a bit irreverent to her current situation.

Mala Emde, as Vera, recreates that spirit of growing up a bit too fast, with that over abundance of energy, while everyone else in her life watches every moment with a bit of resentment.

Vera must eventually deal with her sibling, Fritz, played by Leo Meier, who channels his hate toward his sister and also toward his father, in different ways, as they begrudgingly sit around the kitchen table and have breakfast together.

The story starts out slow and awkward as the teenager begins to tread into the adult world of concert promotion. Then everything takes off when the Ronnie Scott Trio concert tour is successful enough that Vera can begin to live independently without her family knowing.

The narrative gradually leads to Vera hearing a piano concert by Keith Jarrett and grasping the more sophisticated understanding that the music has become even closer to pure freedom.

Vera, still bouncing with the energy of youth, decides to promote a one time concert for Keith Jarrett at the Cologne Opera House. But Vera quickly learns that such an event is not like anything she has done before, beginning with difficulties securing the venue date and then finding the deposit for the opera house.

Flok then leaves Vera in the background to finish promoting the concert while the camera begins to introduce the personality of the jazz musician in more detail. Flok uses an omniscient narrator for this task, who simultaneously becomes part of the script as a character, and, only on occasion, steps away from the narrative to reemerge as the omniscient narrator.

Michael Chernus plays the omniscient narrator and also the character, Michael Watts, a freelance music journalist who has to interview Keith Jarrett to finish his story. The interview has been prearranged through Jarrett’s manager, but the precocious musician keeps backing out.

In the end, the journalist drives to Cologne for the concert in a small Cold War era car with Jarrett and his manager, Manfred Eicher, played by Alexander Scheer. And along the way, the characters of the music journalist, the Jazz musician and the manager are explored  more thoroughly.

Emde performs Vera as struggling a bit with several missteps as she transitions from being a carefree teenager to an adult with a lot of responsibilities as a concert promotor.

Vera reemerges in the third part of the narrative as the final preparations are underway on the day of the concert, and the two parallel narratives of the concert promotion and the jazz musician’s journey to the concert begin to merge.

More characters get introduced into the narrative just as the story involving teenage angst gets a bit tired, and just as Vera begins to find a proper footing from which to move forward into the music world.

The film’s three parallel parts then merge for the climactic conclusion at the Cologne Opera House in West Germany on January 24, 1975.

Flok keeps the film moving forward by switching narrative devices, just in time, which ultimately creates suspense for the closing scenes.

Along the way, as the concert at the opera house nears, everything plunges into an intellectual aesthetic, in tune with the Jazz music under discussion, that from time to time finds order out of the chaos.