One of my favorite music stories is the unlikely, serendipitous string of chance that led to a young musician discovering--while babysitting--a cover of a rare tribute album version of a Leonard Cohen B-side. That struggling artist then recorded it, almost 10 years after it was first released, and included it on his sole full-length album. That album then failed to have major success until its creator tragically died at age 30 in 1997. The song has gone on to become one of the most iconic in popular culture, has been covered by many artists, and people like me even grew up hearing it on the soundtracks of Shrek and The OC).[1]
Oh, and if you didn't click those links: the song is Hallelujah. Jeff Buckley's version remains one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded. While I have you, it's as good a time as ever to recommend Live at Sin-é.[2]
Anyway--I recently asked G to share some of his favorite jazz music and he included this masterpiece, Keith Jarret's The Köln Concert, at the top of the list. When I reacted, G told me about the unlikely story of chance and imperfection that produced it.
When an 18-year-old organized the first jazz concert at the Köln Opera House at the late hour of 11:30pm, the details were already a bit odd. To make matters worse, they accidentally failed to meet Jarret's specific piano request and he had to make due with a smaller, out-of-tune piano with broken pedals. Jarrett, who hadn't slept in two days due to back pain, said he wouldn't play. Throw a rainstorm and bad Italian food into the mix for good measure. Somehow, 18-year-old organizer Vera convinced Keith to play for the waiting audience anyway.
The resulting performance required the pianist to work with the constraint of the flawed instrument--playing mostly in the middle of the piano--and included extended periods of improvisation and vamps. It's stunning, original, and represents the best of what live music can be: a singular, dynamic, collective experience of magic. Köln is also the best-selling solo piano album of all time. An unlikely masterpiece.[3]
I figured I'd write a dedicated post on this film one day, and might still. For now, Katie recently prompted me for the movie I'd recommend watching before you die. Check out the whole list -- I've yet to see many of them and it's a good reminder to get to work!
My answer is, surprisingly, a sequel. Perhaps it is cheating, because I do think you need to watch Before Sunset (1995) to maximize its impact. (The premise of that one? An american guy meets a french girl on a train and convinces her to get off and spend the evening with him in Vienna before he flies home the next morning.)
Unplanned and released nine years later, Richard Linklater's follow-up to that youthful love story fairy tale is--for me--as good as it gets. I believe Before Sunrise (2004) is a perfect film.
It's not for everyone: it's an 80-minute dialogue that is effectively a single scene of two people walking around Paris. If the first film was about drunken, fantastical love, this one has sobered up a bit. But it remains hopeful. It's got two charming people that we can almost believe are real trying to make sense of how the years have passed by so quickly. Being vulnerable about what they still want out of all of this. Showing how they've grown and how they're exactly the same. And it's got the best ending I've seen in a movie (God bless Nina Simone).
I won't belabor it: go watch these two movies, and when you're finished, read this Letterboxd review of Sunset, a.k.a. my personal roman empire. Oh, and then you can watch the third one (!).
I appreciate great writing about friendship. About a common, under-discussed, not-totally-understood type of love between friends.
Some of my favorite writing on that love includes Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow--which I've written about on this newsletter plenty, and Tim Kreider's essay The Anti-Kreider Club from his collection, We Learn Nothing. You could think of that essay as a spiritual sibling to 2022's darkly hilarious Irish unfriending film, The Banshees of Inisherin. A favorite bit:
The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing.
My friend Ava is one of my favorite writers on friendship. Her recent the friendship theory of everything rocks. Some highlights:
People choose places; places shape people; people go on to shape other people. We should be thoughtful about the kind of transformation we opt into.
You accept that in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are.
As with any kind of love, the most important thing is that you both keep coming back.
I recently introduced two friends and the three of us spent a wonderful few days together in London.[4] Afterwards, A shared this bit on multi-dimensional friendship from C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves, which I'll quote in full (formatting mine):
Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but “A’s part in C,” while C loses not only A but “A’s part in B.”
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.
Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love “to divide is not to take away.”
Of course the scarcity of kindred souls – not to mention practical considerations about the size of rooms and the audibility of voices – set limits to the enlargement of the circle; but within those limits we possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom we share him increases.
In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying “Holy, Holy, Holy” to one another (Isaiah VI, 3) The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have.”
Inject that into my veins.
Renaissance Technologies and investing legend Jim Simons passed away last week. This quote stood out to me. It reminds me a bit of how Steve Jobs talks about products in Make Something Wonderful.
Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. Pretty much everything I've done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think, 'well, building a company that's trading bonds, what's so aesthetic about that?' But what's aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right ... it's a beautiful thing to do something right.
My annotation:
In a universe bound by entropy, beauty defies all odds. It holds no necessity, no durability.
Or—perhaps—we are creative beings in a creative universe. Perhaps we aim to create and experience beauty because it is in our essence.
“The world is a museum of passion projects.”
Thanks for reading,
Jackson
There's a great Malcolm Gladwell podcast on the story if you're interested.
Funny enough, the original EP was released a week before I was in 1993.
More:
How a 'Broken' Piano Created a Magical Concert
'The Köln Concert': Keith Jarrett Defied The Odds To Make A Masterpiece
The Köln Concert - Wikipedia
Keith Jarrett on doing the Cologne Concert - YouTube
During what was described to me as a top 1% weather week of the year. Alas… in that weather, it felt like a perfect dream of Los Angeles where there was incredible transit infrastructure and every parking lot was replaced with a park. So green!
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My first newsletter on /paragraph: May Recs: an unlikely masterpiece, my movie rec before you die, friendship and love
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