Mental Pivot #81: Imperfect Tools, Luck, Anti-Goals
Keith Jarrett and the unplayable piano, James Austin’s four types of luck, and the power of avoidance in meeting your objectives.
Jazz fans are familiar with pianist Keith Jarrett’s legendary Köln Concert of 1975. The solo performance was recorded live at the Cologne Opera House in January and the album was released later that year. It became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time and is considered one of the finest recordings of piano improvisation.
It’s also a performance that very nearly didn’t happen. And the story behind the concert offers some insight into the nature of creativity, power of constraints, and making magic from an imperfect situation.
The concert was organized by a 17-year-old named Vera Brandes. Despite her age, Brandes had successfully organized prior shows. Jarrett’s solo performance was the fifth installment in her New Jazz in Cologne concert series.
For the performance, Jarrett requested a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial. Having consulted the venue, Brandes assured him that this wouldn’t be a problem. The instrument was available.
The Bösendorfer Imperial is a gargantuan piano, featuring 97-keys (standard pianos have 88), measuring nearly 10 feet in length, and tipping the scales at a whopping 1217 pounds (552 kg). Piano size is no small matter. The bigger the instrument, the greater its volume, resonance, and dynamic range—critical features not only for the performer, but for filling a large hall with sound. The Bösendorfer Imperial is, according to one classical pianist, the “Rolls-Royce of pianos.”
But Jarrett wouldn’t get his Rolls-Royce. Not this night.
Due to a mixup, the opera house staff procured and set up the wrong piano on the day of the concert.
Jarrett, Brandes, and Jarret’s associate, Manfred Eicher, discovered the error during an afternoon walkthrough onstage at the opera house, hours before curtain.
According to Brandes, instead of the promised Bösendorfer Imperial, Jarrett had been given:
…a tiny little Bösendorfer that was completely out of tune, the black notes in the middle didn’t work, the pedals stuck. It was unplayable.
Keith played a few notes and then Eicher played a few notes. They didn’t say anything. They circled the instrument several times and then tried a few keys and then after a long silence, Manfred came to me and said, “If you don’t get another piano, Keith can’t play tonight.”
Jarrett further described the instrument as something:
….which hadn’t been adjusted for a very long time and sounded like a very poor imitation of a harpsichord or a piano with tacks in it.
Forget Rolls-Royce, this was a Ford Pinto.
The opera house staff had left for the day. Brandes was on her own. She desperately tried to find a better piano, but her efforts were fruitless. She did manage to get a piano tuner onsite, and he would spend hours making the tiny little Bösendorfer usable.
Jarret was frustrated. To make matters worse, he was sleep-deprived, having just driven nine hours overnight from Switzerland, and suffering from chronic back pain. He left the hall and started back to his hotel, fully expecting to cancel altogether.
A desperate Brandes ran outside and begged him to perform. Who knows why he relented. Maybe he felt sorry for the youthful Brandes and her predicament should he renege. Ultimately, Jarrett acquiesced. “Never forget,” he reassured her, “just for you.”
And so at 11:30pm, Jarrett sat before a substandard piano and started playing. “I am now going out here with this piano—and the hell with everything else!” he recounted.
He improvised for over an hour. The audience was mesmerized. From the first notes, they knew they were witnessing something special.
Fans of the album can hear it too. The resulting record would go on to sell nearly 4 million copies and become one of the best-selling piano albums of all-time.
Jarret’s biographer Ian Carr explains how the musician managed so much from so little, this “piano with tacks in it”:
Deprived of the tonal possibilities of a really good piano, he had to adapt to an instrument which sounded more like a superior bar-room piano…it was barely passable in the middle and lower registers, but the upper register often sounded tinny. So Jarrett tends to confine himself to the middle area of the piano a great deal of the time and to play a lot of repetitive rhythms — because it is in the lower middle area of the piano that such rhythms ‘speak’ and sound best. Sonority is more or less abandoned in favor of rhythm —in other words, he plays the whole concert within the limits of his instrument, and within this narrow confine…the greater simplicity and a folky, ruminative quality give the whole concert a clarity which makes the music much more accessible to a lay public.
Jarrett’s friend, the record producer Manfred Eicher, reflected similarly:
[He] probably 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.
The subpar instrument Jarrett didn’t want to play resulted in his most iconic performance and enduring recording. It’s a great lesson in adaptability, having the courage to make the best of the imperfect tools available, and forging ahead despite it all. Take note, that combination might lead to your own unexpected masterpiece.
I listen to The Köln Concert on Spotify, but you can easily find it on your favorite music streaming service.
For an in-depth account of the concert, check out the audio program Keith Jarrett: The Cologne Concert from the BBC Radio series For One Night Only. This long-running series has published episodes of other iconic performances such as Vladimir Horowitz’s famous Carnegie Hall concert, George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, and Eric Clapton’s 1992 Unplugged performance, and much more. Great stuff!
Sources used for the quotes above:
Carr, Ian, “Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music,” Da Capo Press, 1992, pages 70-73.
Gambaccini, Paul (host), “Keith Jarrett: The Cologne Concert,” For One Night Only, Series 6, BBC Radio, December 29, 2011.
Now onto this week's recommendations…
Thinking Tools:
19 Rules for a Better Life from Marcus Aurelius: Ryan Holiday serves bite-sized nuggets of Stoic wisdom in this listicle. Among my favorites: “think progress, not perfection” and “choose sympathy over outrage.”
The Four Types of Luck: A summation of the ideas from the middle-third of the American neurologist Dr. James Austin’s book, Chase, Chance, and Creativity . Austin posits four types of luck: blind luck (e.g., the circumstances into which you are born), luck from motion (i.e., luck generated by your actions), luck from awareness (i.e., using your experience to identify opportunities), and luck from uniqueness (i.e., when your skillset attracts luck to you). Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen also has a classic blog post from 2007 on the same topic that’s also worth a read, Luck and the Entrepreneur.
The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information: Tiago Forte has spent the last decade working on digital organization and “Building a Second Brain.” There are interesting ideas here, despite my growing wariness for “productivity systems.” Yes, he is upselling courses and books, but the clever reader can obtain sufficient inspiration from his free content to experiment with the most compelling elements.
The Power of Anti-Goals: Inversion is one of the simplest and most powerful thinking tools at our disposal. In this 2017 piece, Andrew Wilkinson learned to how to make his workdays happier and more satisfying by working backwards from the problem. Instead of focusing exclusively on his to-dos, he also considers his not-to-dos (aka “anti-goals”).
Reading Enrichment:
The Elements of the Scientific Style: “The point of doing science in the first place is to disseminate results which can be used to further advance science or improve the world,” writes Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Is this possible when so many scientific papers are poorly written and inscrutable? Among the culprits: dense, impenetrable, jargon-filled, and acronym-laden prose. Fortier-Dubois surveys the long-standing debate in scientific circles (dating back to the 1600s) of how to approach scientific writing and offers a handful of ideas for improvement.
The End of the English Major: In the past decade, enrollment in the humanities has cratered at many American universities. Nathan Heller examines the myriad forces precipitating this change, including tuition inflation, student debt, middle-class instability, the attractiveness of STEM careers, and much more. Shifting cultural values, utilitarianism, capitalism, and social status all rear their heads in this lengthy narrative.
The Reaction Economy: A long, sometimes meandering, critique of digital culture. “Our public sphere is frequently dominated by events you could call ‘reaction chains’, whereby reactions provoke reactions, which provoke further reactions, and so on.” In an attention-economy, the content creators are fishing for “engagement”. So important is engagement, that “the online influencer’s fear isn’t negative reactions, but that engagement drops.” There are interesting ideas about the nature of the digital medium (echoes of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman), questions about authenticity, tribalism, group-dynamics, and more.
You Are Not a Parrot: Are AI Chatbots like humans? How is meaning created? Can meaning be generated probabilistically? Does intent matter? Why are we so focused on imagining a “mind” behind the machine? What’s at stake for “synthetic humans”? These questions are explored in this profile of Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington. You’ll learn about a thought experiment involving a hyper-intelligent deep-sea octopus, stochastic parrots, and why Bender cautions against unbridled techno-optimism.
Odds & Ends:
Lose the Very is a nifty tool for bolstering your vocabulary by suggesting stronger adjectives. For instance, instead of “very funny”, “very dangerous”, and “very serious”, the site recommends the words “hysterical”, “perilous”, and “earnest” respectively.
The New Gatekeepers is technology pundit Benedict Evans’ latest annual installment on the key trends shaping the technology industry. This PowerPoint presentation contains a host of compelling charts and visualizations. If you prefer watching a version of Evans’ presentation, featuring more explanation, there’s a 30-minute YouTube videofrom November 2022 in which Evans shares an earlier version of the deck.
Philosophy Bro uses simple language to explain complex ideas. The project, which has been online since 2010, is the brainchild of Tommy Maranges. The archive of summaries isn’t a comprehensive survey of Western philosophy (stick with Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy for breadth and depth), but those that are available are accessible, irreverent, and funny. The Bro has a penchant for profanity, so avoid if that isn’t your cup of tea.
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