★ECM Records
Old And New Dreams
Hot on the heels of Old Friends, New Friends comes Old And New Dreams, an operation meant as a new flagship for Ornette Coleman, whose lack of enthusiasm for the project left a gap duly filled by Dewey Redman. The result is this delightful excursion into post-bop outlands that sounds as alive as ever. Two Coleman pieces comprise nearly half of its duration—which is saying much, for like many of ECM’s joints of the 70s, this one breezes by in under 50 minutes. The first Coleman piece, “Lonely Wom…
Conference of the Birds
*2023 stock* It had been preceded by ECM duo albums with Barre Phillips and with Derek Bailey as well as the cooperative band Circle’s great Paris Concert, but Conference of the Birds, recorded in 1972, was Dave Holland’s first album as a full-fledged leader. An album of driving, progressive jazz it is also of historical significance as the only occasion when Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton, two of the music’s most strikingly original saxophonists, recorded together. Inside Dave’s compositions th…
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…
On Behalf Of Nature
For five decades, vocalist-composer Meredith Monk has explored what she calls “primordial utterance,” or non-verbal vocal sound that lay beneath and beyond language, expressing “that for which we have no words.” This exploration has led her to create music that The New Yorker describes as simultaneously “visceral and ethereal, raw and rapt,” an art that “sings, dances and meditates on timeless forces.” With her latest, multivalent ECM New Series album, Monk aimed to address ecology and climate c…
Barzakh
*2023 stock* "This album marks the beginning of an ongoing and fruitful relationship between Tunisian oud master/composer Anouar Brahem and the ECM label. From the exhilarating solo “Raf Raf,” we know we are in the presence of someone whose sense of touch, rhythm, melody, and atmosphere speaks straight to the heart from the mind of a visionary. This first track puts us into a time and place where only melody speaks, and the sands of time flow like blood in an infinitely chambered heart. The titl…
The Recordings (13 CD Box)
Restocked, reduced price * 13-CD limited edition box set with 300 page booklet * The Recordings, a box set edition compiling all Meredith Monk ECM New Series discs to date, is issued on the occasion of the composer and singer’s 80th birthday. With Dolmen Music in 1981 Meredith became the first singer to be the front person on an ECM recording. Included here are the albums Dolmen Music, Turtle Dreams, Do You Be, Book of Days, Facing North, ATLAS, Volcano Songs, mercy, impermanence, Songs of Ascen…
Full Force
The previous Art Ensemble of Chicago ECM album Nice Guys vaulted them to the top of improvised music groups in the U.S. and worldwide, paving the way for similar bands to be more accepted into the mainstream of modern music. Where "Full Force" generally lives up to the title, there's also a palpable diverse approach, producing more than enough potent music brimming from the sinews of these brilliant musicians to uphold their burgeoning cache. The crown jewel of this effort is "Charlie M," a blue…
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…
El Corazon
The trumpeter sketches a succession of melodies and moods around and over the rich textural detail and earthy solidity of Mr Blackwell’s drumming,” noted Robert Palmer in The New York Times. “The melodies come from Spain, Africa, Jamaica and the modern jazz compositions of Thelonious Monk, but Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell transform them into a personal music that is as urbane and international as they are. Together, they make El Corazón one of the most impressive duet albums of recent years.” Thi…
African Piano
South African pianist-composer Abdullah Ibrahim (born Adolph Johannes "Dollar" Brand), still performing at the time of this 1969 live album under the moniker “Dollar” Brand, unleashed a mastery so enticing on African Piano, it’s a wonder that any of the folks at the club where it was recorded had the resolve to treat it as background to their dining. By the same token, reinforcement of that fact by constant ambient noises renders Ibrahim’s performance all the more sacred by contrast.Amid a sea o…
The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles
The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles is a 21-CD limited and numbered edition issued as the standard-bearers of Great Black Music prepare to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Both the Art Ensemble of Chicago and ECM Records were founded in 1969, and there have been many shared experiences. As Roscoe Mitchell says, “It has been amazing to have taken this journey together.”With their first ECM album, the widely-acclaimed Nice Guys, the Art Ensemble’s revolutionary and polystylistic …
The ECM Recording
Marking the occasion of Steve Reich’s 80th birthday (hup, big man!), The ECM Recordings compiles three CDs of the venerable minimalist composer’s major works, which were consecutively released in 1978, 1980 and 1982, and continue to influence and inspire myriad forms of modern music. Named “our greatest living composer” (The New York Times), “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village Voice), and “…the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), Reich’s ardent, incisive wo…
Violin & Orchestra
Carolin Widmann’s widely acclaimed ECM recordings have traversed a broad arc of music – from Schubert to Xenakis. Here she turns her attention to one of the pivotal compositions of Morton Feldman. Violin and Orchestra, composed in 1979, marked a new direction, with an almost painterly attention to detail in slowly unfolding music. It is not a concerto in the strict sense of the term, not soloist with orchestral support. The violinist must move inside the glowing colour-field of sound. In t…
Dolmen Music
Meredith Monk and her vocal troupe cut a line between experimental theatre and music, marking a passage through the Ancient Greek tragedy, the opera, world-music, the archaic ritual and the mystical chant. It started with "Gotham Lullaby", presenting a contralto over a desolate and stark piano sonata. Then "Travelling" set a feverish gypsy dance, a wild ritual stirring the primeval forces at play. The sonata returned in "The Tale", as the backbone to an offbeat pantomime/ theatrical performance.…
Sacred Hymns
A series of piano transcriptions of some solemn, now-dark, now-affirmative religious hymns by one G.I. Gurdjieff, with none of the usual flourishes and heady flights usually associated with Keith Jarrett's solo records. Jarrett assumes the proper devotional position, playing with a steady tread but always with attention to dynamic extremes, producing a gorgeously rich piano tone with plenty of bass.