Learning How to Drive a Piano

Johanna Billing

For me, coming to Pulheim the first time, I was struck by the structure of the city—and perhaps most of all, of the in-between places. The many small villages were connected, but still had a lot of countryside in between. And the set-up—with not very much public transport—makes it almost resemble some American cities, the ones where people are very dependent on their cars. The statistics also show that the average household in Pulheim has something like 2.7 cars. The majority of people living in Pulheim also commute to work in the surrounding cities, and culture and art are also something that most people in this area consume in the bigger cities. I became more and more interested in the cars—the fascination people have with their cars, and the time spent in them in their daily lives, as well as the in-between spaces of this “constructed city”. The idea came to me to work with this in a quite straightforward way—in the construction of a traffic jam along one of these in-between roads in the countryside area. A traffic jam is in a way the most terrible and time-consuming thing you can think of and not something you would deliberately want to put yourself in. But it has been challenging to think about how one could turn it into something that is almost the opposite—like a parade, perhaps, a kind of a quiet and unexpected “Volksfest”. With a similar organisational structure to that of a music festival, involving the red cross safety van and outdoor toilets, volunteers in yellow jackets etc.—but without any other activity or “line-up” than the cars themselves.

Through an open call via newspapers, e-mails, handouts, and car flyers we managed to get 60 car owners to spend their Saturday afternoons with us up on the windy field: children, dogs, older couples, friends, and families. People stopped their cars during a couple of hours to read books, play games, run after their dogs in the wheat fields, spontaneously start to talk to each other over their car bonnets—and in the end eventually help each other out when the cars were about to move again, as three cars had no batteries left after too much time spent listening to the radio.

Parallel to the time period of research into the cars and traveling to Cologne and Pulheim the year before, I had stumbled kind of accidentally upon a record in our vinyl collection at home that I had not seen in many years. It was The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett (the now-famous solo piano improvisations performed before a live audience at the Cologne Opera House on 24 January 1975). It was a funny coincidence in many ways, as I had just read that the communal reform that later made Pulheim a city (along with the other villages surrounding it) also took place in 1975 (Pulheim was later awarded city rights in 1981). But most of all, what became interesting for me was that I had been thinking earlier about working with piano for a soundtrack, and exploring methods of working with improvisation (which is always an important part of my way of working in film as well as in music). So to now think about making something that could include almost a tribute to this historical piano concert in Cologne, and to place it in connection to the traffic jam in Pulheim, somehow made sense. This became the starting point for the project that is now called Pulheim Jam Session , in which the idea of the “Jam” is exploring the improvisation in the traffic jam, and at the same time in a separate musical jam that involves a scene of a more private, rehearsal-based character, with the Swedish artist and musician Edda Magnason improvising on a grand piano in a nearby barn in Stommeln.

Writing this text only three days after the filming occurred, I am still in middle of the process somehow and have not yet started to work on the editing of what will later become a film. So the memories of all the encounters with the people and their cars are still very much alive. And the beautiful soundscape of singing birds and cars going by outside the barn while Edda was playing the piano is still ringing in my ears. During the improvisation scenes, the piano, for us, seemed to transform more and more into some kind of a vehicle as well—playing multiple roles in this film along with the other cars. And funnily enough, one of the strongest images I have before my eyes is when the piano movers came to fetch the grand piano and we saw the huge instrument being carefully dismantled into pieces and finally put on a wooden trolley with four wheels—before it, too, drove away.

Johanna Billing, Stockholm, 22 June 2011