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Miroslav Vitous Group
*2024 stock* Between 1979 and 1982, the Miroslav Vitouš Group was the primary outlet for the abundant improvisational skills of leader Vitouš and John Surman. They made three ECM albums: this eponymously-titled disc from 1980 is the middle one. Vitouš and Surman were well-matched in lots of ways, with roots and influences that extended beyond jazz, a love of playing freely, a commitment to using all the sound potential of their respective instruments: Surman singing at the top of the baritone sa…
A Hilliard Songbook - New Music For Voices
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Although by now almost habitually referred to as Britain’s foremost early music vocal group, the Hilliard Ensemble (founded 1974) has long had an equal, and complementary, commitment to contemporary music. Its members have sought out new music that adapts itself to the group’s blend of voices and, where necessary, commissioned works from composers they admire. In their recitals, century-spanning leaps – from John Cage, say, to Josquin Deprez (or vice versa), from P…
Paul Hindemith, Alfred Schnittke, Anna Gourari, Markus Poschner, Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana Lugano
Paul Hindemith / Alfred SchnittkeAfter three acclaimed solo piano programmes for the label, here Anna Gourari widens the instrumental spectrum with the Lugano-based Orchestra della Svizzera italiana under Markus Poschner’s direction in striking performances of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra and Paul Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments. Gourari’s pianistic command is one of “virtuoso polish and with flawless action”, to quote the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and her holistic, wide-reaching grasp of…
Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Fascinating and highly attractive project which returns the music of Gurdjieff (c. 1866 – 1949) to its ethnic inspirational sources. To date Gurdjieff’s compositions have largely been studied, in the West, via the piano transcriptions of Thomas de Hartmann. Armenian composer Levon Eskenian now goes beyond the printed notes to look at the musical traditions that Gurdjieff encountered during his travels, and rearranges the compositions from this perspective. Eskenian…
Piano Songs
Celebrating Meredith Monk as composer, these Piano Songs give us a world at once playful and earnest. Written or derived from work composed between 1971 and 2006, the pieces inhabit Monk’s unique universe, as played by two of new music’s most distinguished interpreters, pianists Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker. These pieces are ‘songs’ because they have strong roots in Monk’s pieces for voice, and because they are direct, specific, and imagistic. Meredith Monk on composing for two pianos: “I de…
Silent, Listening
Silent, Listening is a major addition to ECM’s distinguished line of solo piano recordings, featuring one of the outstanding improvising pianists and jazz masters of our time: Fred Hersch. The album features seven original creations and a handful of well-chosen standards, including Billy Strayhorn’s “Star-Crossed Lovers”, Sigmund Romberg’s “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise”, Alec Wilder’s “Winter Of My Discontent” and Russ Freeman’s “The Wind”, all played with the focus, sensitivity and gracefuln…
Gateway
With “daring and visionary spirit”, to quote a Downbeat review from the year of this album’s release, master improvisers John Abercrombie, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette forged a unique vision of trio interplay on their first joint effort under the Gateway moniker. The trio tackles Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette originals with a visionary idea of what three-way conversations in jazz could sound like. As The Observer remarked in an article of the time, “the telepathic ensemble playing and per…
Octet • Music For A Large Ensemble • Violin Phase
*Includes 24-page booklet with photos and liner notes* Steve Reich's commercial success had ballooned after his prior release on ECM, Music for 18 Musicians, and this collection of three compositions, two new and one from 1967, was the follow-up. Music for a Large Ensemble is very much of a piece with the prior work, using extended melodic lines, a larger palette of sound colors, and key changes every several minutes. It's charming and pleasantly busy in an industrious way but really covers litt…
Zartir
*Deluxe packaging* The third album from Levon Eskenian’s remarkable ensemble is its most adventurous to date. As well as reclaiming the music of esoteric teacher G. I. Gurdjieff for folk instrumentation, Zartir situates Gurdjieff in a tradition of Armenian bards and troubadours including Ashugh Jivani, Baghdasar Tbir and the legendary Sayat-Nova. In parallel, an emphasis on pieces for sacred dance reaches its apex in The Great Prayer, an entrancing collaboration between the Gurdjieff Ensemble an…
The Finnish/Swiss Tour
*2024 stock* "This is an extraordinary record, full of fire, reckless abandon, and thrilling playing from Russell, obviously, but also from his great band." - AllMusic"The deliriously happy sound of The Finnish/Swiss Tour is equally worthy of reverent veneration and ecstatic celebration." - Marc Masters, JazzTimesThe Finnish/Swiss Tour is a live album by the Hal Russell NRG Ensemble recorded in November 1991 at Tampere Jazz Happening in Finland and the Internationales Jazz Festival in Switzerla…
When We Leave
*2024 stock* Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick’s expressive playing, which according to the New York Times radiates a “pristine yet penetrating tone”, is remarkably well complemented in the company of his gifted supporting players and fellow travelers. Violinist Håkon Aase, one of the outstanding improvisers of his generation, shadows the leader with lines that draw upon folk traditions as well as jazz. Drummers Helge Andeas Norbakken and Torstein Lofthus mirror their exchanges, as they interact …
Lebroba
Andrew Cyrille’s title Lebroba is a contraction of Leland, Brooklyn and Baltimore, birthplaces of the protagonists of an album bringing together three of creative music’s independent thinkers. Each of them made his first ECM appearance long ago: drummer Andrew Cyrille on Marion Brown’s Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (1970), trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith on his own classic Divine Love (1978), and guitarist Bill Frisell on Eberhard Weber’s Fluid Rustle (1979); these are, of course, players of enduring …
Streams
*2024 stock* On his second leader album for ECM – following on from the prizewinning Gefion – Danish guitarist Jakob Bro continues to refine his trio project, with its emphases on melody, sound, space, layered textures and interaction. The rapport between Bro and Thomas Morgan (Bro calls him “my musical soul mate”) has become something extraordinary, and often guitarist and bassist develop improvisational ideas in parallel. There’s an historical aptness, too, in the choice of Joey Baron as the b…
Andando El Tiempo
*2024 stock* Andando el Tiempo features new music of wide emotional compass by Carla Bley, and underlines her originality and resourcefulness as a jazz composer. “Saints Alive!” sets up animated conversations between the three musical participants with striking statements from Steve Swallow’s bass guitar and Andy Sheppard’s soprano sax. The stately “Naked Bridges/Diving Brides” draws inspiration from Mendelssohn and the poetry of Paul Haines. And the powerful three part title composition – wh…
Midwest
*2024 stock* Mathias Eick reflects on distances travelled in this intensely melodic set of original compositions, which makes an imaginative journey from Hem, the tiny Norwegian village where the trumpeter grew up, to the vast plains of Dakota in the American Midwest. It was to the Midwest that hundreds of thousands of Norwegians travelled by sea in the 19th and early 20th centuries – and naturally they took their music with them. In similar spirit Eick, a Norwegian improviser-composer strongly…
September Night
Recorded at Munich’s Muffathalle twenty years ago, in September 2004, this previously-unreleased concert recording of the Tomasz Stanko Quartet is a fascinating document, capturing a developmental chapter in the music between the song forms of the Suspended Night repertoire and the improvised areas that the Polish musicians would explore on Lontano. The Munich show was a highlight in a year in which the Stanko Quartet played a record number of gigs, with extensive tours of the US and Europe. T…
Big Vicious
*2024 stock* Charismatic trumpeter Avishai Cohen launched his exuberant, home-grown band Big Vicious six years ago, after relocating from the US to his native Israel, rounding up players to shape the music from the ground up, and co-authoring much of its newest material together with them. The group is an association of old friends. “We’re all coming from jazz, but some of us left it earlier”, Avishai says, summing up the stylistic reach of his cohorts. “Everyone’s bringing in their backgrounds…
After The Requiem
Original 1991 LP edition Stepping into the territory of Gavin Bryars is like coming home, so familiar are the morphemes with which he composes his musical language. One of the most significant recordings in the Bryars catalogue, this disc offers a fine condensation of his spirited and nostalgic sensibilities.
After the Requiem dates from 1990 and follows his Cadman Requiem of the previous year. After completing the latter, which was written for the Hilliard Ensemble in memory of Bryars’s friend…
Strands (Live At The Danish Radio Concert Hall)
"When we walked out on stage it felt like a homecoming,” says Jakob Bro of this texturally spacious and emotionally charged live recording from Copenhagen, on which three of the defining protagonists of improvisation in Denmark, leading musicians from three generations of Danish jazz, come together. The concert, in February 2023, was particularly poignant since it marked a return to performance for trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, who delivers some of his most thoughtful playing here. Repertoire, dra…
Naked Truth
There is a searching, yearning quality to Naked Truth, and a raw beauty and vulnerability in Avishai Cohen’s trumpet sound on his most improvisational ECM recording to date. Very much music-of-the moment, found and shaped in the course of a remarkable recording session in the South of France, Naked Truth takes the form of an extemporaneous suite. For most of its length the Israeli trumpeter painstakingly leads the way, closely shadowed by his long-time comrades – pianist Yonathan Avishai, bassi…