Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, this is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record.
Speaker 1: We're going on a short hiatus for the holidays, but
Speaker 1: we'll be backed January twenty eighth, and guess what we're
Speaker 1: going weekly in twenty twenty. Super excited and trust me
Speaker 1: when I say we have some great shows coming up
Speaker 1: for you guys. But while you're waiting, we wanted to
Speaker 1: give you a chance to check out another great show
Speaker 1: from Pushkin Industries. It's called Cautionary Tales and it's hosted
Speaker 1: by Tim Harford, who hosts some great shows for the BBC.
Speaker 1: An episode you're about to hear, Tim explores a pivotal
Speaker 1: performance by one of the great jazz improvisers of all time,
Speaker 1: pianist Keith Jared. His solo live shows are known to
Speaker 1: be among the best concert performances. Ever, none of them
Speaker 1: are ever the same. His shows are so special that
Speaker 1: I remember spending an entire paycheck when I was only
Speaker 1: sixteen to catch him in downtown LA and it was
Speaker 1: worth every last cent. But in order for him to
Speaker 1: walk out on stage and improvise, he needs conditions to
Speaker 1: be perfect. He's a notorious control freak who demands complete
Speaker 1: quiet from his audiences. No talking coffee and walking to
Speaker 1: her from the bathroom, just complete attention to the music. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Jared's most famous recording comes from a show where nothing
Speaker 1: was right. So why was this concert that should have
Speaker 1: been terrible one of the best of his career. That's
Speaker 1: tim starting point, but it's question for an answer. Leads
Speaker 1: us to David Bowe and producer Brian Eno. You'll want
Speaker 1: to hear this episode, believe me. Here's Tim Harford. As
Speaker 1: the night draws in and the fire blazes on the hearth,
Speaker 1: we warn the children by telling them stories. The juniper
Speaker 1: tree teaches them, Oh, I don't know what it's just horrendous,
Speaker 1: don't google it. But my stories are for the education
Speaker 1: of the grown ups, and my stories are all true.
Speaker 1: I'm Tim Harford. Gather close and listen to my cautionary tale.
Speaker 1: Late in January nineteen seventy five, a German teenager named
Speaker 1: Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne
Speaker 1: Opera House. The auditorium was empty, lit only by the
Speaker 1: dim green glow of the emergency exit sign. This was
Speaker 1: the most exciting day of Vera's life. Vera loved jazz
Speaker 1: and was frustrated that there just wasn't enough good jazz
Speaker 1: in Cologne, so at the age of sixteen, she had
Speaker 1: started to arrange concerts herself. Tonight would be the fifth
Speaker 1: and by far the biggest. Vera Brandes had persuaded the
Speaker 1: Cologne Opera House to host a late night concert of
Speaker 1: jazz from the American pianist Keith Jarrett. A remarkable venue
Speaker 1: for a remarkable twenty nine year old musician. Jarrett had
Speaker 1: already played with greats such as Art Blakey and Miles Davis,
Speaker 1: but now he was on his own. The vast auditorium
Speaker 1: was sold out. Fourteen hundred people were coming, easily the
Speaker 1: largest audience for Jarrett's tour of improvised piano performances. In
Speaker 1: just a few hours, Keith Jarrett would walk out alone
Speaker 1: on that stage. He'd sit down at the piano, and
Speaker 1: without rehearsal or sheet music, he'd begin to play. But
Speaker 1: right now Vera was introducing Keith to the piano in question,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't going well. Jarrett looked at the instrument
Speaker 1: a little warily, played a few notes, walked around it,
Speaker 1: tried a few more. His producer, Manfred Eicher, joined in.
Speaker 1: Neither of them spoke to Vera instead. They were huddled together.
Speaker 1: Then Manfred Eicher came over to Vera. If you don't
Speaker 1: get another piano, Keith can't play tonight. There'd been a mistake.
Speaker 1: Jarrett was and is an exacting musician. He likes things
Speaker 1: to be perfect, absolutely the way he wants them, and
Speaker 1: he'd requested a specific piano, a Bersendorfer Imperial. The opera
Speaker 1: house had told Vera Brands they had just the thing,
Speaker 1: but somehow the piano on stage was nothing like what
Speaker 1: had been promised. As Vera Brands remembered, they found this
Speaker 1: tiny little Burstendorfer that was completely out of tune. The
Speaker 1: upper and the lower octave was wrecked, the black notes
Speaker 1: in the middle didn't work, the pedal stuck. It was unplayable,
Speaker 1: absolutely unplayable, and quite understandably, Jarrett didn't want to play it.
Speaker 1: And when it became clear there was no way to
Speaker 1: get at a replacement piano on stage. When it became
Speaker 1: clear that it was the unplayable piano or nothing, Keith
Speaker 1: Jarrett opted for nothing. He walked out into the rain,
Speaker 1: leaving a bedraggled Vera Brands trailing behind him, begging him
Speaker 1: not to cancel when fourteen hundred people showed up for
Speaker 1: their late night concert. Vera Brandas was going to find
Speaker 1: herself facing a riot. You're listening to another cautionary tale.
Speaker 1: About the same time as Keith Jarrett's encounter with the
Speaker 1: Unplayable Piano on the side of Germany, a very different
Speaker 1: musician was scrambling over his own musical obstacle. Course David Bowie,
Speaker 1: the unearthly ambisexual rock icon, had moved to Berlin. Bowie
Speaker 1: had had a grim, alienating period living in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: He was beset by legal troubles, his marriage alternated between
Speaker 1: indifference and contempt, and he was taking far too many
Speaker 1: hard drugs. It was a dangerous period for me, Bowie reflected.
Speaker 1: But Bowie had a very different attitude to his music
Speaker 1: than Jarrett. While Jarrett was a purist, Bowie actually enjoyed
Speaker 1: self imposed obstacles. Bowie believed that accidents were to be treasured,
Speaker 1: even planned, rather than avoided. That's why he asked Brian
Speaker 1: Eno to join him and his producer Tony Visconti in Berlin.
Speaker 1: They'd meet regularly in Hunsa Studio too, the Big Hall
Speaker 1: by the Wall, as Bowie called it, It was a
Speaker 1: beautiful rca flawed concert hall popular for recording chamber music,
Speaker 1: and a few hundred feet away from the shadow of
Speaker 1: the burning wall. Eno took to showing up at the
Speaker 1: Hansa studio with a soft black box containing a selection
Speaker 1: of curious cards he called oblique strategies. They're quite simple,
Speaker 1: these cards, small black text on a white background, curved corners.
Speaker 1: They're about the size of playing cards, although there are
Speaker 1: more than a hundred of them, making a thick deck
Speaker 1: to be shuffled and consulted. Each card has a different instruction,
Speaker 1: and you never know which one you're going to get.
Speaker 1: Eno once told me, you have to pick one if
Speaker 1: you don't like it. Tough. Whenever the studio sessions were
Speaker 1: running aground, Eno would draw a card at random and
Speaker 1: relay its strange orders. Be the first not to do
Speaker 1: what has never not been done before. Look at the
Speaker 1: order in which you do things. Emphasize the floors, change
Speaker 1: instrument roles. Sure enough, during the recording of David Bowie's
Speaker 1: Lodger album, Carlos Alamar, one of the world's greatest guitarists,
Speaker 1: was told to play the drums instead. Another guitarist, Adrian Bellu,
Speaker 1: was asked to improvise a solo in response to a
Speaker 1: recording that would eventually become the single boys Keep Swinging. Sorry,
Speaker 1: don't worry about the key, just play. Belieu described the experience.
Speaker 1: It was like a like a freight train coming through
Speaker 1: my mind. It's an amazing solo though, and that astonishing
Speaker 1: wailing guitar at the beginning of Heroes, that's Robert Fripp.
Speaker 1: Fripp was just playing around with guitar feedback, but when
Speaker 1: Visconti patched together the random noises, the effect was beautiful.
Speaker 1: The poet Simon Armitage describes the cards as if you're
Speaker 1: asking the blood in your brain to flow in another direction.
Speaker 1: That doesn't sound fun. Yet the strange, chaotic working process
Speaker 1: produced some of the decade's most crittically acclaimed albums, Low
Speaker 1: Heroes and Lodger. You can't argue with the results. I
Speaker 1: sought out Brian Eno to discuss this strange approach of
Speaker 1: deliberately adding obstacles. Eno is to me one of the
Speaker 1: most interesting musicians alive. He began his musical career in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies with Roxy Music, where he'd create strange
Speaker 1: sound effects and play synthesizer with a giant plastic knife
Speaker 1: and fork. He created Music for Airports, a simple, beautiful
Speaker 1: landmark in ambient music, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,
Speaker 1: an influential, sample rich collaboration with David Byrne, and Another
Speaker 1: Green World, the record that Prince once named as his
Speaker 1: biggest inspiration. Eno has collaborated with Talking Heads, You Too,
Speaker 1: Twiler Tharpe, Cold Play, Laurie Anderson, Gavin Bryars, Paul Simon,
Speaker 1: and the Cult director David Lynch. When the music magazine
Speaker 1: Pitchfork listed its top hundred albums of the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: Brian Eno had a hand in more than a quarter
Speaker 1: of them. And of course there's his remarkable collaboration with
Speaker 1: David Bowie. But I wanted to talk to Brian not
Speaker 1: just because he's produced beautiful music with remarkable people using
Speaker 1: very strange methods, but also because Brian Eno is, like me,
Speaker 1: a nerd. He thinks hard about why obstacles are so
Speaker 1: often helpful. Listen on and I'll tell you what I learned.
Speaker 1: You know, that feeling of being a tourist in a
Speaker 1: totally foreign land, how rich all the tiny details are,
Speaker 1: how densely layered the memories you can look back on
Speaker 1: a day and marvel at just how much you managed
Speaker 1: to pack in, whereas a day of your normal routines
Speaker 1: can be hard to remember at all. One of the
Speaker 1: things that Brian Eno is trying to achieve with his
Speaker 1: Strange Cards is that same sense of attention of being alert.
Speaker 1: The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually, and the
Speaker 1: friend is alertness. Now, I think what makes you alert
Speaker 1: is to be faced with a situation that is beyond
Speaker 1: your control, so you have to be watching it very
Speaker 1: carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to
Speaker 1: stay on top of it. That kind of alertness is exciting.
Speaker 1: There's nothing like an unfamiliar problem to make you start focusing.
Speaker 1: If things feel out of your control, maybe even a
Speaker 1: little dangerous, that gets the adrenaline flowing, and, in the
Speaker 1: right circumstances, the creative juices too. This attention grabbing effect
Speaker 1: applies whether we're talking about trying to play a strange instrument,
Speaker 1: navigate a strange place, or work together with a strange person.
Speaker 1: And while it sounds dramatic, it can work its magic
Speaker 1: at a subliminal level. It can be something as subtle
Speaker 1: as whether the words we're reading on a page look
Speaker 1: familiar or odd. Consider a study by the psychologists Connor Diamond, Yeoman,
Speaker 1: Daniel Oppenheimer, and Erica Vaughan. They teamed up with high
Speaker 1: school teachers, getting them to reformat the teaching handouts they used.
Speaker 1: Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials
Speaker 1: in standard fonts such as Times New Roman. The other
Speaker 1: half got the same documents reformatted into one of three
Speaker 1: challenging fonts, the dense text of Haddensfeiler, the cursive flourishes
Speaker 1: of Monotype Corcever, or the zesty bounce of comic sans italicized.
Speaker 1: These fonts are, let's be honest, distracting and hard to read.
Speaker 1: But the ugly fonts didn't hamper the students at all.
Speaker 1: Students who had been taught using them ended up scoring
Speaker 1: higher on their exams. We don't know exactly why, but
Speaker 1: it seems that the strange fonts prompted them to pay attention,
Speaker 1: to slow down, and to think about what they were reading.
Speaker 1: If such obstacles make us focus and think harder, they
Speaker 1: may end up not being obstacles at all, but secret weapons.
Speaker 1: There's a second reason that the oblique strategies may have
Speaker 1: helped David Bowie. They pushed him to try something fresh.
Speaker 1: Brianino described to me the tendency of highly skilled musicians
Speaker 1: to end up exploring a narrow territory because it's the
Speaker 1: only place they feel completely comfortable. You get more and
Speaker 1: more competent at dealing with that place, and your cliches
Speaker 1: become increasingly clichde. But when you're forced to start from
Speaker 1: somewhere new, the cliches can be replaced with moments of magic.
Speaker 1: This effect is well understood far outside the realm of music.
Speaker 1: Computer scientists use algorithms to look for solutions to complex problems,
Speaker 1: and those algorithms often use the tactic of stepping back
Speaker 1: and adding some randomness part way through their search. What
Speaker 1: sort of complex problems do I have in mind? There
Speaker 1: are plenty planning efficient roots for a fleet of parcel
Speaker 1: delivery trucks, figuring out the best layout for a silicon chip.
Speaker 1: Such problems have so many possible solutions that it's impossible
Speaker 1: even for a computer to check them all. So computer
Speaker 1: scientists have developed algorithms that try to find a solution
Speaker 1: that may not be perfect, but it is good enough
Speaker 1: you'd be surprised at how many of these algorithms add
Speaker 1: random shocks and remixes. Those shocks are there to prevent
Speaker 1: the algorithm getting stuck on a bad solution. In the jargon,
Speaker 1: that's called a local optimum, but you or I would
Speaker 1: simply call it a dead end. The random shocks offer
Speaker 1: a way of backing out of the dead end and
Speaker 1: trying something else. This might seem a long way from
Speaker 1: our everyday concerns. We're not musical geniuses and we're not
Speaker 1: computer algorithms, but the same logic is at play in
Speaker 1: the most humdrum circumstances, such as our daily commute. For example,
Speaker 1: in my own long standing commute across the London Underground,
Speaker 1: I know exactly where on the platform I should stand
Speaker 1: when I get on the first Tube train, to ensure
Speaker 1: that after riding nine stars, including a change of lines,
Speaker 1: I'm in the perfect position to be first on the
Speaker 1: escalator out of London Bridge station and thus at the
Speaker 1: front of the line for coffee the Monmouth coffeehouse near
Speaker 1: the tube exit. Find differences in where I stand on
Speaker 1: a train platform on one side of the city determine
Speaker 1: how quickly I get my coffee. Half an hour later
Speaker 1: on the other side. Yes, I promise myself I'd never
Speaker 1: become that person. Happened anyway, And however you commute, you
Speaker 1: likely have your own little shortcuts and time saving habits,
Speaker 1: assuming that is those habits really do save you time,
Speaker 1: because according to the logic I've been outlining, if you
Speaker 1: commute being forced to change your plans, they actually help
Speaker 1: you in the long run. It's the obstacle in your
Speaker 1: path that forces you to find a better path. But
Speaker 1: in what circumstances might the London underground possibly be disrupted?
Speaker 1: I hear you ask well. In February twenty fourteen, two
Speaker 1: trade unions representing workers on the subway launched a forty
Speaker 1: eight hour strike which closed well over half the stations
Speaker 1: on the system. The first day of the strike was wet,
Speaker 1: as well as being cold and dark, which will have
Speaker 1: discouraged people from simply walking or getting on a bike.
Speaker 1: The trains and buses that day were rammed full of
Speaker 1: grumpy commuters trying to figure out how to get around
Speaker 1: the disruption. After the strike, the economists Ferdinand roush Seawan
Speaker 1: Larcom and Tim Williams looked at data from London's electronic
Speaker 1: fair card system those fair cards work on the subway,
Speaker 1: the buses, and the overground trains too. Rousch and his
Speaker 1: colleagues identified people who had to change from their regular
Speaker 1: route during the strike. Most changed back again when the
Speaker 1: strike was over, of course, but many did not. They
Speaker 1: realized that they'd been getting their own commute wrong all
Speaker 1: their lives, and all it took to prod them to
Speaker 1: finding a better way was two days of disruption. So
Speaker 1: there are two reasons why an obstacle might actually help
Speaker 1: us solve a problem. First, the ugly font effect. The strange, unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: or even threatening situation grabs your attention and holds it.
Speaker 1: You're not checking your phone, you're not daydreaming, you can't
Speaker 1: afford to miss a second. And then there's the tube
Speaker 1: strike effect, the way a random disruption forces you to
Speaker 1: try something totally new, whether by forcing us to pay
Speaker 1: attention or by prodding us to try something different. These
Speaker 1: obstacles can actually help us find better solutions to the
Speaker 1: problems we face. But this is still a cautionary tale
Speaker 1: because it's a story of danger. The danger is that
Speaker 1: we shun these obstacles, avoid difficulties, flee from problems, when
Speaker 1: in fact we might flourish from facing them head on.
Speaker 1: Keith Jarrett, after all, didn't celebrate the appearance of a
Speaker 1: bad piano on stage at his largest ever concert, rubbing
Speaker 1: his hands in glee at the opportunity to have his
Speaker 1: creativity supercharged by the challenge. Of course he didn't. He
Speaker 1: walked away. Who wouldn't when faced with the unplayable piano.
Speaker 1: We resist. We resist all sorts of obstacles. But the
Speaker 1: most obvious example of this resistance comes when the obstacle
Speaker 1: is a strange or unfamiliar person. There's a large body
Speaker 1: of research that suggests a diverse group of people I
Speaker 1: mean people of different ages, genders, nationalities, professions, and political views.
Speaker 1: That diverse group of people is more likely to find
Speaker 1: solutions or make better judgments than a group full of lookalikes,
Speaker 1: everyone echoing everyone else. When pulling together a team, our
Speaker 1: instinct is to go for quality, the best people we
Speaker 1: can find, But perhaps instead we should be going for variety.
Speaker 1: One analogy is that different perspectives, skills, and experiences are
Speaker 1: like different tools and the toolbox. A well stocked toolbox
Speaker 1: is more useful than a case full of hammers, even
Speaker 1: if they're really good hammers. But while we should be
Speaker 1: looking for a diverse group, we tend to gravitate to
Speaker 1: the familiar friends rather than strangers, people who look and
Speaker 1: sound like us, who reflect our own views and make
Speaker 1: us feel comfortable. We are hammers looking to get cozy
Speaker 1: with other hammers, and we view wrenches and screwdrivers and
Speaker 1: saws as awkward misfits. There's an elegant experiment that underlines
Speaker 1: this point, conducted by the psychologists Katherine Phillips, Katie Lillianquist,
Speaker 1: and Margaret Neil. They gave murder mystery problems to students.
Speaker 1: These problems consisted of dossiers of information with alibis and evidence,
Speaker 1: witness statements, and a choice of three possible suspects, so
Speaker 1: who committed the crime. The researchers divided the groups into
Speaker 1: two sets at random. In one set, the murder mysteries
Speaker 1: would be solved by four people who knew each other
Speaker 1: four friends. In the other set, the dossiers would be
Speaker 1: given to three friends and one stranger for maximum awkwardness.
Speaker 1: You can see where I'm going with this. Obviously, I'm
Speaker 1: going to say that the groups with the stranger solved
Speaker 1: the problem more effectively, which they did, but the scale
Speaker 1: of the improvement may surprise you. The groups of friends
Speaker 1: did better than a random guess between the three options,
Speaker 1: but the groups with a stranger did much better yet,
Speaker 1: with a success rate of seventy five percent. In fact,
Speaker 1: the groups with the stranger were as far ahead of
Speaker 1: the groups of friends as the groups of friends were
Speaker 1: ahead of pure random guests work. But what's really interesting
Speaker 1: is not just that the groups with the stranger made
Speaker 1: smarter decisions than how they felt about it. When the
Speaker 1: scientists interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a
Speaker 1: nice time, and they also thought they'd done a good job.
Speaker 1: They were complaisant. When they spoke to the three friends
Speaker 1: and the stranger, they hadn't enjoyed themselves, and they were
Speaker 1: fun of doubts about whether they'd chosen the guilty man.
Speaker 1: I think that really exemplifies the challenge. Here's what seems
Speaker 1: like an obstacle, this awkward stranger sitting in the group
Speaker 1: and spoiling everyone's fun. But the obstacle is actually a
Speaker 1: secret weapon. The stranger dramatically improves the performance of the group,
Speaker 1: yet the people in the group don't realize it. The
Speaker 1: same thing happened with Brian Eno and his curious cards.
Speaker 1: The musicians hated them. That can't have been a surprise
Speaker 1: to Eno. On that earlier Eno album that Prince loved
Speaker 1: so much, Another Green World, Eno asked Phil Collins, the
Speaker 1: Superstar drama from Genesis, to play the instructions from the cards.
Speaker 1: So infuriated Collins he was reduced to hurling beer cans
Speaker 1: across the studio in frustration. Faced with one piece of
Speaker 1: card inspired foolishness, the guitarist Carlos Alomar told, you know,
Speaker 1: this experiment is stool. The violinist Simon House commented the
Speaker 1: sessions often sounded terrible. Carlos did have a problem simply
Speaker 1: because he's very gifted and professional. He can't bring himself
Speaker 1: to play stuff that sounds like crap. How do we
Speaker 1: persuade ourselves to engage with broken tools, from possible deadlines
Speaker 1: or awkward people when really all we want to do
Speaker 1: is hurled beer cans. Back in dark, rainy Cologne in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, young Vera Brands was in big trouble,
Speaker 1: an opera house full of paying customers, an unplayable piano,
Speaker 1: and an understandably reluctant Keith Jarrett. So she did the
Speaker 1: only thing she could. She ran after Jarrett found him
Speaker 1: waiting in his car, flung open the door and begged
Speaker 1: him not to cancel. And Keith Jarrett, looking out at
Speaker 1: this rain drenched teenage girl, took pity on her. Never forget,
Speaker 1: just for you, Keith Jarrett would play after all. While
Speaker 1: a tuner worked to straighten out some of the kinks
Speaker 1: in the unplayable piano, Vera Brands took Jarrett and Manfred
Speaker 1: Ikea to an Italian restaurant to get some food before
Speaker 1: the show. Jarrett barely had time to bolt down a
Speaker 1: few mouthfuls of pastor before rushing back to the opera
Speaker 1: House to face the piano. The instrument was now in tune,
Speaker 1: but still had some silent keys, a malfunctioning sustain pedal,
Speaker 1: and was harsh and tinny in the upper register, but,
Speaker 1: of course, not being a full sized concert grand, it
Speaker 1: was simply too quiet. If played in the conventional style,
Speaker 1: it would never fill the vast auditorium with music. But
Speaker 1: it was too late to back out. Now utterly alone
Speaker 1: in front of fourteen hundred people, Jarrett walked back out
Speaker 1: onto the stage of the Opera House. He sat down
Speaker 1: at the unplayable piano and began. The minute he played
Speaker 1: the first note, everybody knew this was magic. That's something
Speaker 1: I will never forget. The first tone and everybody was
Speaker 1: totally mesmerized. Jarrett was avoiding those tinny upper registers. He
Speaker 1: was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which
Speaker 1: gave the piece a soothing ambient quality. His left hand
Speaker 1: produced rumbling, repetitive bass riffs as a way of covering
Speaker 1: up the piano's lack of resonance. The music had a
Speaker 1: trance like quality as a result, but Jarrett couldn't simply
Speaker 1: relax into that easy listening zone because the tiny piano
Speaker 1: simply wasn't loud enough. He stood up, twisting, pounding down
Speaker 1: on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to
Speaker 1: reach the people in the back row. Jarrett really had
Speaker 1: to play that piano very hard to get enough volume
Speaker 1: to get to the balconies. He was really pachoo pushing
Speaker 1: the hoods down, standing up, sitting down, moaning, writhing. Jarrett
Speaker 1: didn't hold back in any way as he pummeled the
Speaker 1: unplayable piano to produce something unique. That night became legendary,
Speaker 1: the performance that made Keith Jarrett's reputation. It wasn't the
Speaker 1: music that he ever imagined and playing, but handed an
Speaker 1: impossible mess. Jarrett saured, I never before or after saw
Speaker 1: anybody so immersed in his music. You could see it.
Speaker 1: He was absolutely there. That was how one member of
Speaker 1: the audience remembers it. It's just as Brian Eno said,
Speaker 1: what makes you alert is to be faced with a
Speaker 1: situation that is beyond your control. Jarrett was having to
Speaker 1: play the piano in a different style, from a different stance,
Speaker 1: remembering to avoid certain faulty keys, and all in front
Speaker 1: of the largest audience he'd ever faced. You can bet
Speaker 1: that he was alert, and you can bet also that
Speaker 1: he was trying something new, like a commuter dealing with
Speaker 1: a transport strike who suddenly discovers a fresh way to
Speaker 1: the office. Keith Jarrett could have played the music he
Speaker 1: played at Cologne on any piano, but it was only
Speaker 1: when he was forced to deal with the limitations of
Speaker 1: a bad piano that had occurred to him to try.
Speaker 1: Usually we don't try unless something forces us to. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's a subway strike, maybe it's the turn of an
Speaker 1: oblique strategist card, or maybe it's a gilt trip from
Speaker 1: a German teenager. You might wonder why Keith Jarrett and
Speaker 1: Manfred Ikea even bothered to record the concert when they
Speaker 1: expected it to be an embarrassment. It's a fair question.
Speaker 1: Jarrett had told Ika to send the recording engineers home,
Speaker 1: what was the point, but Ika argued that since they
Speaker 1: were there, they might as well press record on the
Speaker 1: tape machine. Jarrett later admitted the logic, we know what
Speaker 1: we went through, We've paid for the sound guys to
Speaker 1: come here, so why don't we just let him record
Speaker 1: it and we'll have a tape of it. That way,
Speaker 1: at least Iker would have documentary evidence of what a
Speaker 1: musical catastrophe sounds like. But he didn't get a catastrophe.
Speaker 1: He got a masterpiece. The recording was released as the
Speaker 1: Coln Concert. It's the best selling piano album in history,
Speaker 1: and the best selling solo jazz album too. There's something
Speaker 1: very special about it. My wife asked me to put
Speaker 1: the music on while she was in labor, not once,
Speaker 1: but twice, and it's so good that, even after that
Speaker 1: rather painful association, we both still love listening. Yet it's
Speaker 1: so nearly never happened. If vera Branders hadn't begged. If
Speaker 1: Keith Jarrett hadn't felt pity for that, the draggled teenage girl,
Speaker 1: he certainly would never have chosen to play on a
Speaker 1: piano like that. Varah Branders wasn't credited on that blockbuster album.
Speaker 1: She never got a penny of royalties, and in a
Speaker 1: way that's fair enough. Concert promoters aren't artists, and yet
Speaker 1: I have no doubt that the Coln concert would never
Speaker 1: have been such a special piece of music without Vera
Speaker 1: Branda's and her unplayable piano. All of us, from time
Speaker 1: to time have to deal with our own unplayable pianos.
Speaker 1: When that happens, we need to sit down and try
Speaker 1: to play. You've been listening to Cautionary Tales, and if
Speaker 1: you liked this particular episode, I wrote a book about
Speaker 1: these ideas. It's called MESSI you might like it. Cautionary
Speaker 1: Tales is written and presented by me Tim Harford. Our
Speaker 1: producers are Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound designer
Speaker 1: and mixer was Pascal Wise, who also composed the amazing music.
Speaker 1: This season stars Alan Cumming, Archie Panjabi, Toby Stevens and
Speaker 1: Russell Tovey with enso Celenti, Ed Gochen, Lenny Gutteridge, Mass
Speaker 1: Siam and Roe, rufus Wright and introducing Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks
Speaker 1: to the team at Pushkin Industries, Julia Barton, Heather Fame,
Speaker 1: Mia LaBelle, Carlie Migliori, Jacob Weisberg and of course the
Speaker 1: mighty Malcolm Gladwell. And thanks to my colleagues at the
Speaker 1: Financial Times,