Jazz and Classical Treasures from the Digitized Catalogue of ECM Records

This article originally appeared on this site.

One of the defining sound-worlds of the past half-century of recorded music is the distinguished repertory of ECM Records, which was founded by the Munich musician and producer Manfred Eicher, in 1969. As of today, its entire catalogue of about sixteen hundred albums will arrive in the digital realm—on Amazon, Spotify, iTunes, and a host of other platforms. That’s news in itself—but the label’s resistance to digitization, until now, is as much a part of the story.

The name is an acronym, standing for “Edition of Contemporary Music,” and Eicher, a jazz musician, started his label with some of the best, and most advanced, jazz of the time. (His first release was a vigorous trio session with the central though somewhat under-the-radar pianist Mal Waldron, who had accompanied Billie Holiday and performed with John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy.) Along with heroes of modern jazz (several of which are sampled below), Eicher promoted the work of European jazz musicians and a diverse group of international performers and composers, and expanded to include, so to speak, modern classical music. (His 1978 recording of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” was groundbreaking, as was his 1984 recording of Arvo Pärt’s “Tabula Rasa.”) From there, he expanded the label to include classical music from the Middle Ages through the mid-twentieth century, performed by such notables as Gidon Kremer, Kim Kashkashian, András Schiff, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja. The musician most readily associated with ECM is the pianist Keith Jarrett, who first appeared on the label in 1972 and was responsible for what are likely its best-sellers, his solo concerts of the nineteen-seventies, and has followed up with dozens of recordings, both of improvisations and of classical music (including Shostakovich, Bach, and Mozart).

But Eicher had more than repertory in mind. As a musician, he wanted to reproduce, in his recordings, the way music sounded to him in live performance—he wanted his records “to come a little closer to reality.” The ECM sound is a trademark of the times; it’s both crystalline and reverberant, conveying both the preternatural intimacy of live performance and the inhabited warmth of a concert space—a sort of three-dimensional sound. It’s precisely because of the delicate grain of instruments and voices, the wispy overtones of their spatial diffusion, that ECM has preferred to sell its recordings, distinguished by their audiophilic precision, as albums (and then CDs) and has, until now, shied away from the compression of fast digital downloads and streams. (Its stated motive for making the recordings available digitally now is to combat unauthorized online uploads of the albums.)

It’s no exaggeration or mixed metaphor to speak of Eicher’s musical vision; he thought of movies from the start, taking inspiration from soundtracks—foremost, that of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre sa Vie,” from 1962. Eicher returned the favor, sending Godard batches of recordings that eventually inspired the soundtrack to the filmmaker’s “Nouvelle Vague,” from 1990, and his music has graced most of Godard’s films since then.

Like any forward-looking artist with a distinctive style, Eicher’s work with ECM also lends itself to self-cliché, to self-stereotyping—there are plenty of releases that could be called ethereal, eclectic, soothing, non-confrontational, uplifting. But many of the label’s recordings have the opposite and salutary effect—music that’s bold, challenging, spiky, and potentially off-putting and aggressive is presented with the humane warmth, in sonic form, that is at the core of its inspiration. I’ve been living with treasures from ECM since my teen years as a free-jazz freak, and have followed the label through with delight in some of its bolder classical-music releases. Here are ten tracks from ECM albums (including one not recorded by ECM but reissued by the label) that are among my personal treasures and delights.

“Four Winds,” by David Holland, from “Conference of the Birds”

Fresh from a stint with Miles Davis, the bassist Dave Holland recorded his début as a leader with a quartet that included two generations of saxophone masters, Sam Rivers (one of the fathers of free jazz, whose NoHo loft was a hub of musical action at the time) and Anthony Braxton (who, like Holland, was in his mid-twenties), as well as the young drummer Barry Altschul. The album, “Conference of the Birds,” came out in 1973; I snapped it up as soon as it hit the bins of the local head shop-slash-record store; it was my introduction to the ECM label.


“Rock My Soul,” by Mal Waldron, from “Free at Last”

Waldron is one of the most quietly distinctive pianists of the time. There’s a trance-like power to his small melodic figures, which he obsessively reworks until they break open and yield their musical essence. Here, he’s joined by the Swiss bassist Isla Eckinger and the American drummer Clarence Becton.


“Duet,” by Circle, from “Paris-Concert”

Circle was a coöperative quartet with Braxton, Holland, Altschul, and the pianist Chick Corea (who’d become an ECM mainstay). Corea was also an alumnus of Miles Davis’s band; this track is a collaboration between him and Braxton.


“Lonely Woman,” by Old and New Dreams

Speaking of alumni, this quartet features four of the most prominent collaborators of the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whose music and ideas provided the crucial breakthrough of free jazz, in 1959: the saxophonist Dewey Redman, the trumpeter Don Cherry, the bassist Charlie Haden, and the drummer Ed Blackwell. (In the late nineteen-seventies, a year or two before this album was recorded, they had rejoined Coleman for a New York concert that I attended.)


“Charlie M,” by Art Ensemble of Chicago, from “Full Force”

When I saw the Art Ensemble of Chicago in a basement space in Philadelphia, in the mid-seventies, it took the group longer to set up for their concert than to perform it. All five musicians played a set of “little instruments” (such as ocarinas and bicycle horns), as well as their usual ones, and the two saxophonists, Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell, played every sax from sopranino to contrabass, as well as a variety of flutes and clarinets. Their stage was very crowded, to match their teeming musical concept, which started with the avant-garde and embraced the history and prehistory of jazz with a theatrical fervor. This 1980 track displays their modern stylings in a classical vein.


“Harpsichord Suite Set I, No. 1, in A major, HWV 426: Gigue,” from Georg Friedrich Händel, “The Eight Great Suites”

The Moscow-born, Vienna-based pianist Lisa Smirnova plays Handel’s solid, dance-based forms with an extraordinary gestural and rhetorical freedom.


“Sonata No. 1,” Op. 105, First Movement, by Robert Schumann, from “The Violin Sonatas”

The violinist Carolin Widmann’s approach to Schumann’s sonatas reveals the genius of ECM’s approach—she’s something of a specialist in modern music, and her approach to these dark-toned, unduly unfamiliar masterworks of the classical repertory has a rhythmic freedom and a textural astringency that wrench them into the realm of contemporary, highly expressionistic music.


“Prelude and Fugue No. 7, in A Major,” by Dmitri Shostakovich, “24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87”

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues, lonely music of fears and dreams and relentlessly single-minded purpose, written in the leaden years of postwar Stalinist terror, get a personal, impulsively responsive performance from the pianist Keith Jarrett.


“Divertimento for Strings, Sz. 113: 1. Allegro non troppo,” by Béla Bartók, from “Verklärte Nacht”

The violinist Thomas Zehetmair, who had recorded eighteenth- and nineteenth-century warhorses for major classical labels, conducts Camerata Bern on one of Bartók’s later masterworks, a sort of symphony for strings, with a sure, deft, and dancing sense of rhythm.


“Communications No. 11, Part 2,” by Michael Mantler, from “The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra”

Recorded in 1968 under the aegis of the composer Michael Mantler, reissued by ECM in 1994, this album features something of an all-star team of modern jazz. Mantler’s compositions offer its soloists a springboard for powerful inspirations, none greater than the titanic piano performance by Cecil Taylor, spread over two tracks running more than a half-hour.

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