For the purposes of this review, I should note three things: 1) I know very little about jazz. 2) Keith’s Jarrett’s The Köln Concert is one of my desert-island, all-time-favourite albums. 3) I know nothing at all about Jarrett himself and have never heard any other music by Jarrett.

All of this is to say that, before I’d heard about Köln 75 and then, subsequently, watched it, I was unaware of the circumstances surrounding Jarrett’s famous concert. I’ve since read that some of the details may have been misrepresented, but, again, I can’t speak to that. What I can speak to is just how much I love this movie.

Köln 75 is ostensibly about 18-year-old Vera Brandes, who, in the early 1970s, became Germany’s premiere jazz concert promoter. This eventually led to her booking Jarrett into the Köln Opera house during his European improv tour, i.e., each night it was just him and a piano on stage with no pre-determined setlist/plan. I won’t get into the complications and challenges Brandes had to deal with in order to bring this event to fruition, and there are many of them, as I enjoyed knowing very little about what was going to unfold.

Bouncing back and forth in time, having characters directly address the camera, and, most significantly, taking us on an extended, Jarrett-focused digression, writer/director Ido Fluk—undoubtedly inspired by the somewhat free-flowing music he’s celebrating—uses a variety of techniques to skillfully and entertainingly tell what is essentially a classic underdog narrative.