Here is a niche drama about one of the most important chapters in the history of experimental jazz. It is however watchable, well acted and avoids the music-movie cliches – though I could have done without the fourth-wall-breaking lectures about the nature of jazz improvisation. They were perhaps inspired by similar setpieces in Adam McKay’s financial crisis movie The Big Short, and are heavy-handed and condescending in just the same way.
John Magaro plays Keith Jarrett, the great jazz pianist and former Miles Davis collaborator who in the mid-70s found himself on a gruelling European solo tour, improvising every night for the ecstatic jazz faithful who were more plentiful in Europe than the US, while struggling with depression and back pain. Mala Emde plays the amazingly precocious 18-year-old Vera Brandes, a kid from Cologne who had become a jazz promoter after being inspired by an encounter with Ronnie Scott, and rebelling against her grumpily conservative dentist father, played here by Ulrich Tukur.
With extraordinary chutzpah, Vera books Jarrett to play at the Köln Opera House, putting up a DM10,000 deposit borrowed from her mum. She is forced at the last moment to arrange a desperate repair and tuning for the rickety and insultingly unacceptable rehearsal piano which had been wrongly placed on stage for his performance. She then has to beg moody Jarrett not to go into a full-tilt Glenn Gould-style strop and cancel the whole thing. So it is up to the feisty and passionate teen to jolt the great genius out of his catatonic disillusionment and despair so he can give the performance that was to become an iconic live jazz album.
Michael Chernus plays jazz critic and journalist Mick Watts who was there to witness this unique event, and it is Watts who goes into those Big Short lessons. It feels odd that we don’t hear much or any of the concert itself, perhaps due to copyright restrictions, and the final euphoric montage is accompanied by different music altogether. At any moment during the pre-show chaos and panic, it seems as if Vera will have to give up, because circumstances are against her. But her exasperated brother tells her to find a way: “Improvise!” (I’d like to think that intensely symbolic moment actually happened.) It’s a likable, fizzy performance from Emde and the film interestingly avoids any question of a sentimental reconciliation with her disagreeable old dad.