Space, shadow, atmosphere: All are qualities integral to ECM, the Munich record label launched by Manfred Eicher in 1969. Founded as a jazz label, ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) eventually branched out to encompass classical and contemporary composition. But the sway of those intangibles of tone and texture is so powerful, they tend to dwarf more earthbound considerations, like genre. Space, shadow, and atmosphere are there in the copious natural reverb and yawning silences and pristine acoustics that have become Eicher’s signature as a producer. (They’re there, too, in virtually every one of the label’s immaculately designed sleeves: the wintry landscapes, the monochrome abstractions, the just-so typography.) To the uninitiated, it’s an aesthetic that could seem tasteful almost to a fault. To its fans, though, the ECM catalog is home to some of the deepest, most transporting music—improvised, composed, and some combination of the two—to be released over the past five decades.
ECM has displayed a particular knack for identifying sounds likely to cross over to a non-specialist public: Enduring crowd-pleasers like Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, and Arvo Pärt’s devotional hymns have found their way into many a record collection otherwise untouched by jazz or classical or sacred music, and they have changed the course of popular music along the way. But the bedrock of ECM’s roster belongs to a slightly different kind of musician—standouts in their respective fields, yet hardly household names, like the avant-garde jazz group Art Ensemble of Chicago (including Roscoe Mitchell and Lester Bowie), the Tunisian oud master Anouar Brahem, and the groundbreaking pianist/composer/bandleader Carla Bley. (While the label has never delved deeply into electronic music, in 2011 it did open up the vaults to Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer’s sprawling Re: ECM remix project—a teasing glimpse of possible new directions for the label’s second 50 years.)
Until very recently, the only way to hear an ECM recording was to acquire it on vinyl or CD. But last week, ECM titles began to trickle onto Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and other streaming services. A statement framed the previously unannounced move as a necessary counter to the unauthorized distribution of ECM titles on YouTube and file-sharing sites. Still, the label couldn’t resist slipping in an old-school aside: “The physical catalogue and the original authorship are the crucial references for us: the complete ECM album with its artistic signature, best possible sound quality, sequence and dramaturgy intact, telling its story from beginning to end.” Streaming listeners, they seem to imply, are only experiencing a fraction of the experience.
To mark this new era of ECM, we’ve put together a guide to a few of our favorite releases: canonical, left-field, and somewhere in between. We’ll readily admit we’ve only just barely scratched the surface of the surface, given that the label’s catalog comprises some 1,600 titles, but every one of these can serve as a stepping stone into the furthest reaches of its universe. –Philip Sherburne
Keith Jarrett: Facing You (1971), Solo Concerts: Bremen / Lausanne (1973), The Köln Concert (1975)
Keith Jarrett was hyper-prolific through the 1970s, with a steady stream of records from his two working jazz quartets and a number of experimental records that were hard to classify. But his most iconic music from the decade remains his work for solo piano. On releases like The Köln Concert and Sun Bear Concerts, Jarrett essentially created a new form for the instrument, one based on spontaneous improvised pieces that could be jagged and atonal one moment and stunningly lyrical the next. While his solo piano is defined by his live recordings, his first full-length solo work on the instrument, the 1971 album Facing You, set the template for what was to follow, and it remains one of his best records. Dense and intricate, it veers from boogie-woogie funk to ghostly ballads and is impossible to pin down from one moment to the next. The other two essential solo piano records are his first two live sets. Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne, from 1973, draws on two concerts to show the staggering range of what Jarrett could do at the piano. Extended passages find him going inside the instrument to pluck the strings with his hands, and the final 20 minutes of Lausanne, which build from spacious modal probing to frantic scalar workouts, are so beautiful as to defy belief. In a sense, that passage paved the way for The Köln Concert, which is not only Jarrett’s best-known LP but was also a multi-platinum sensation. Toning down the abstraction in favor of lyricism, Köln is Jarrett at his best and deserves its heady reputation. –Mark Richardson
Listen to Facing You on Spotify + Apple Music
Listen to Solo Concerts: Bremen / Lausanne on Spotify + Apple Music
Listen to The Köln Concert on Spotify + Apple Music
Steve Reich – Music for 18 Musicians (1978)
ECM may be best known as a jazz label, but some of its most important recordings have come from the realm of classical music and contemporary composition. Among these, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is one of the most iconic—even though, ironically, it was originally produced for Deutsche Grammophon and then shelved for two years before Eicher got his hands on the recording. Released in 1978, it is a landmark of 1970s minimalism—certainly one of the period’s most sensually gratifying products, thanks to the keen balance of rhythm and harmony, as well as the lush, almost pneumatic timbres produced by an ensemble of strings, clarinet, piano, mallets, and voice. Stretched out across an hour, the piece’s steady pulses take on the quality of a cityscape viewed from inside a speeding train: flashing spots of color piled up into a vivid, ever-shifting moiré. As many times as the piece has been put to tape, this recording remains the definitive rendition; even the Steve Reich Ensemble’s own attempt to revisit the piece on a 1998 Nonesuch release feels stiffer and more clinical, a world away from the mossy magic of the original. –PS
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Pat Metheny: New Chautauqua (1979)
On the record collector message board I read sometimes, there is a thread named “Advanced Smooth.” There are apparently many people who love an easy listen but are sick of soft riffs and wilting soprano sax, as the conversation runs to more than 700 replies that span the course of four years. Its thesis asks the questions: “Where is the challenging smooth? Can it even exist?” Perhaps it does, but it is definitely not Pat Metheny. He is unadvanced smooth. For all the lovers of basic smooth, Metheny is the godhead. But advanced smooth would arguably not exist had he not opened the door with his tangy acoustic guitar. His 1979 album New Chautauqua is the pinnacle of his gentle sound and electrified acoustic moves: It’s all Metheny, strumming along to himself pleasantly. It could be what you listen to when you’re on hold with Aetna. It could be what you listen to cooking something delicious. It won’t be what you put on to impress anyone. Anyone but yourself, that is. –Matthew Schnipper
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Egberto Gismonti: Solo (1979)
A classically trained pianist, and a guitarist whose self-designed instruments contained 10, 12, or even 14 strings, Egberto Gismonti has followed a wide path in pursuit of his muse. He traveled to Paris to study piano with associates of Messiaen, Stravinsky, and Copland; he also ventured to the heart of Brazil’s Xingu region, where he camped out and played his flute for two weeks until the head of a local tribe took him in. Those experiences fed into Sol do Meio Dia, a 1978 album, recorded with Nana Vasconcelos, Ralph Towner, Collin Walcott, and Jan Garbarek, that unites tabla, berimbau, kalimba, flute, and lilting choruses in songs that teem with invisible life. The following year’s Solo makes for an even more captivating introduction to Gismonti’s work, split between dazzling excursions for solo acoustic guitar and deeply lyrical piano fantasias. The closing “Ciranda Nordestina,” named after a folk dance from Pernambuco, opens with a brushed percussion that sounds for all the world like the whine of rainforest insects, lending an eerie overtone to music that flows like an enchanted stream. –PS
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Arvo Pärt: Arbos (1987)
Given the mystical nature of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s music, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if a divine hand ever nudged his career in the right direction. Censured by Soviet authorities for the overt Christian content of his Credo, he retreated from music until chancing upon Gregorian chant on the radio, which he described as “a window opening onto another world.” By similar serendipity, Manfred Eicher heard Pärt’s music on his car radio and determined to track down the composer and record him. Pärt’s Tabula Rasa was the inaugural release on ECM New Series, the label’s classical arm, in 1984, and he has gone on to become one of the label’s most influential artists. An entire strain of ambient-leaning neo-classical music, including Stars of the Lid and Nils Frahm, is virtually unthinkable without his example.
Though sometimes described as a minimalist, Pärt’s devotional expressions and early-modern sensibilities set him apart from more formalist composers. Pieces such as Passio or Miserere are vast chasms of feeling, almost melodramatic in their pathos; 1999’s Alina is so spare and beautiful that it verges on the maudlin. Arbos remains an excellent introduction to his work, encompassing the strident brass and bells of the title track, the meditative tones of Christopher Bowers-Broadbent’s pipe organ, and the carefully limned vocal harmonies of the Hilliard Ensemble—a prolific a cappella quartet that would go on to record some 20 albums for ECM, from 15th-century madrigals to collaborations with the jazz saxophonist Jan Gabarek. –PS
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Steve Tibbetts: Big Map Idea (1989)
Steve Tibbetts was far from the only noodling guitarist on ECM in the ’80s. Had he made records solo, without interesting percussion, they would have been notable but likely not as quirky and wonderful as they are. On Big Map Idea, arguably Tibbetts’ pinnacle, his exploratory guitar is accented by various small noises, like the thumb piano and the steel drum. But it is the tabla playing of Marcus Wise that makes the album so unique. His sound approximates someone pounding wet clay, and it is sprinkled across the album as interjections that buoy Tibbetts’ thoughtful playing. The songs are never linear, but they never go off track either, instead revolving around some unseen magnetic core. Though Big Map Idea is from 28 years ago, it sounds new now. –MS
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Meredith Monk: Book of Days (1990)
Meredith Monk is not so much a singer as a sculptor, theorist, and alchemist of the voice. Her art gets to the root of what Joan La Barbara called “the original instrument” and stretches it towards the stratosphere. Composed as the score to a film of her own making, her 1990 album Book of Days further develops the laser-like focus of earlier albums, such as Dolmen Music, Turtle Dreams, and Do You Be, collapsing classical minimalism into medieval plainsong with uncanny emotional resonance. Small-ensemble choral parts are drawn out over churning organ and hurdy gurdy; “Plague” is a tumble of hissing and growling that builds at the speed of rumor to a blood-chilling climax. –PS
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Paul Bley: Solo in Mondsee (2007)
Paul Bley’s 1973 album Open, To Love is one of the essential albums in ECM’s catalog, and an essential solo-piano album, period. It is unmissable both for its emotional directness and its quiet experimentalism, as Bley judiciously plucks and strums at the strings inside the instrument; it sounds, at times, like his hand has strayed from the concert grand to strike a long, resonant chord on an adjacent harpsichord. Solo in Mondsee, his first album of solo piano for ECM since Open, To Love, is a gorgeous, late-career album recorded in 2001 and released in 2007, to commemorate his 75th birthday. It is rare to encounter improvised music this deeply rooted in popular song form. For much of the album, his tender melodic sensibility verges on balladry, though it’s not all so dulcet: “Mondsee Variations III” shifts seamlessly between blues forms and spidery, atonal figures. Throughout, you can hear him humming faintly over the music, as though he were willing the melodic line into being, and guiding it along its absent-minded way. –PS
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Dino Saluzzi and Anja Lechner: Ojos Negros (2007)
Dino Saluzzi was born in 1935 in the tiny town of Campo Santo, in northwestern Argentina, where his field-worker father taught him to play the bandoneón, the accordion-like instrument central to tango. After moving to Buenos Aires, Saluzzi played in tango orchestras and jazz ensembles, soaking up the avant-garde innovations of Astor Piazzolla’s “tango nuevo” movement. His ECM debut, 1983’s Kultrum, was an album of solo bandoneón infused with Argentine folk influences—an outlier even for a label dedicated to the outer limits. He has since recorded in many different configurations for the label—2005’s Senderos, a duo record with the Norwegian drummer Jon Christensen, is an atmospheric marvel—but his long-running collaboration with the German cellist Anja Lechner might be his most rewarding project. The two instruments are both timbrally distinct yet somehow intuitively complementary; it is a warm, enveloping sound. What is most remarkable is how much they can express in so few notes. The slightest nuance—the contrast between Lechner’s legato lines and Saluzzi’s staccato chords, or her pizzicato touch tapping against his slow sighs—speaks volumes. –PS
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Vijay Iyer – Break Stuff (2015)
The New York pianist Vijay Iyer is one of the ECM roster’s most vital new artists, with four albums (either solo or as bandleader) in just the past three years. Along the way, he has covered M.I.A.’s “Galang,” co-produced Das Racist’s “Free Jazzmataz,” teamed up with towering jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, composed for string quartet, and made a collaborative album with Mike Ladd about the indignities of flying while brown. As if that’s not enough proof of Iyer’s restless interests, “Hood,” from his 2015 trio album Break Stuff, is a reference to the Detroit techno producer Robert Hood, whose hypnotically phased pulses drive the tune’s tricky, pointillistic attack. Since its earliest days, ECM has been home to some breathtaking piano albums, and despite sharing its name with a Limp Bizkit song, Break Stuff is no exception. The breakneck keys-and-drums interplay of “Countdown” feels like a ballad that’s been tossed into a particle accelerator, while“Taking Flight” takes a bold, broad line and fractures it into smaller and smaller pieces. And the bookending “Starlings” and “Wrens” are steel-girded dark rainbows—meditative lullabies with a secret severity at the heart of their tenderness. –PS
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