CHINAMI YAMAGUCHI - The Koln Concert (2025)
It’s strange to listen to an album remade - after fifty years - an album you once loved so intensely that you FIRST wore the grooves of the original vinyl down to barren, disjointed riverbeds and THEN ran entire batteries of high-resolution FLAC players into the ground. It’s strange because imprinting makes you feel that something is off.
You can’t quite listen to what is unfolding as a sequence of sound in your ears and in your head. A shiver, an intuition of possibility that might generate anxiety - Kierkegaard docet.
But it doesn’t happen.
Because the brain plays its part too. After preparing itself to accept the beauty of the pianist’s choice and gesture - to confront this monolith, technically and emotionally - hoping at least to stir the souls of those listening (without being able to erode the material solidity of the original) and in fact succeeding - the brain shields itself, activates memory (of the original), compares, interprets, and judges.
A beautiful performance BUT (and it is a BUT carrying existential weight) it is not Jarrett. An excellent cover, a fine melodic and rhythmic reworking BUT (another BUT) fifty years ago all of this emerged from nothing as a new necessity, as an event. Today’s version is a re-performance, and every remake betrays (or loses) something of the original.