ECM special
Movies
This vinyl album by Micheal Mantler is new old stock from Ecm archives. For light relief from his darker, more existential works, Michael Mantler assembled two fine ensembles at the end of the 1970s to play music that might be described as the Thinking Man’s Answer to Fusion. Imagine walking into an art house cinema where the projector runs without film - the stories unfolding purely through Michael Mantler's haunting trumpet and the alchemy of his stellar ensemble. That's the experience of Movi…
The Finnish/Swiss Tour
A landmark in avant-garde jazz, The Finnish / Swiss Tour captures the irrepressible energy and inventiveness of the Hal Russell NRG Ensemble live in Europe. Recorded in November 1990 at the Tampere Jazz Happening (Finland) and the Internationales Jazz Festival Zürich (Switzerland), this album documents the group’s first European tour and was originally released by ECM in 1991.
Led by multi-instrumentalist Hal Russell (tenor & soprano saxophones, trumpet, vibraphone, drums), the NRG Ensemble feat…
The Epidemics
The Epidemics is an album by Indian violinist L. Shankar and British vocalist, keyboardist and composer Caroline recorded in February 1985 and released on ECM the following year.Elsewhere's Graham Reid included the album in his list of "10 Unusual ECM Albums of the Eighties I Own," and remarked: "This is a kind of post-punk electro-pop outing... Synth pop with very little catchy pop, emotionally flat vocals by Caroline, widdly rock guitar by Vai and bassist Jones probably wondering why he was do…
Entendre
A fascinating solo album from the Swiss pianist, composer and conceptualist best known as leader of the bands Ronin and Mobile, Entendre offers deeper insight into Nik Bärtch’s musical thinking. As the album title implies Entendre is about hearing as a creative process, referencing the patient unfolding of Bärtch’s modular polymetric pieces, with alertness to the dynamics of touch, finding freedom in aesthetic restriction, serving the flow of each piece’s development while also taking the music …
Musik Für Zwei Kontrabässe, Elektrische Gitarre Und Schlagzeug
*2024 stock* "After discovering the unique hand-wringing style of guitarist Christy Doran on Red Twist & Tuned Arrow, I was excited to check out this seemingly neglected record, for which he was again joined by drummer Fredy Studer, only this time, intriguingly enough, with two bassists: Bobby Burri and Olivier Magnenat. Burri is a familiar name in the ECM circuit, having shared stages with Pierre Favre, Manfred Schoof, and Tim Berne, and of course as a member of OM (also with Doran and Studer).…
Ritual
2025 stock Keith Jarrett and conductor-pianist Dennis Russell Davies have been friends and musicalcomrades for forty years. In the mid-70s the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, under Davies’ directionpresented Jarrett’s chamber music. In the 90s Jarrett recorded the Mozart piano concertos with Davies and the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester. Near the beginning of their association, Jarrett invited Davies to play a composition he had written for solo piano. To listen to Ritual is akin toexperiencing the core…
Opening
The repertoire features original compositions and Norwegian folk themes, balancing lyrical melodies with subtle harmonic exploration. Pieces such as “The Circle” and “Stream” highlight Gustavsen’s ability to let themes emerge organically, favoring patient development and deep listening over overt virtuosityWith Opening, Tord Gustavsen returns to the classic piano trio format that has defined his ECM legacy, unveiling a fresh perspective on his distinctive blend of Scandinavian folk hymns, gospel…
Isabela
2025 stock On his second release for ECM New York-based saxophonist Oded Tzur introduces a heightened sense of urgency and a conceptually augmented approach to his distinctive voice, weaving one underlying musical idea through a series of elaborate and impassioned designs. The quartet’s lineup is unchanged from 2020’s Here Be Dragons and the group’s interplay has grown even more expressive in the meantime. Throughout Isabela the saxophonist and his collaborators – pianist Nitai Hershkovits, Petr…
Dance Of The Elders
2025 stock Wolfgang Muthspiel and his trio with Scott Colley on bass and Brian Blade on drums reaches a new creative peak on Dance of the Elders – the group’s follow-up up to the much lauded Angular Blues, which The Times called a “quietly impressive album”. Here Wolfgang’s successful stride continues, with his unique compositional signature on the one hand and the particularly vibrant interchanges with his trio colleagues on the other. The guitarist’s writing and approach to jazz is heavily fol…
Frozen Silence
*2025 stock* Frozen Silence is the third ECM release from alto saxophonist Maciej Obara’s Polish-Norwegian quartet bringing the story forward from Unloved and Three Crowns – and perhaps its strongest musical statement to date. Alert interactivity is the hallmark of the group’s approach in a programme of new Obara compositions inspired by the starkly dramatic landscapes of the mountainous Karkonosze region in south-west Poland. All four players make decisive contributions to the music. The pieces…
Bordeaux Concert
Bordeaux Concert is a special document from Keith Jarrett’s last European tour. Each of Jarrett’s 2016 solo piano concerts had its own strikingly distinct character, and in Bordeaux the lyrical impulse is to the fore. In the course of this improvised suite, many quiet discoveries are made, and there is a touching freshness to the music as a whole, a feeling of intimate communication. Reviewing the July 2016 performance, the French press spoke of hints of the Köln Concert and Bremen-Lausanne in t…
Where The River Goes
*2024 stock* Where The River Goes carries the story forward from Wolfgang Muthspiel’s highly-acclaimed Rising Grace recording of 2016, reuniting the Austrian guitarist with Brad Mehldau, Ambrose Akinmusire and Larry Grenadier, heavy talents all, and bringing in the great Eric Harland on drums. Much more than an “all-star” gathering, the group plays as an ensemble with its own distinct identity, evident both in the interpretation of Muthspiel’s pieces and in the collective playing. The album, re…
Characters On A Wall
*2024 stock* Louis Sclavis’s 13th ECM recording finds the French clarinetist drawing inspiration from two sources – the street art of Ernest Pignon-Ernest, and the interpretive originality of a splendid new quartet. Pignon-Ernest’s works were previously the subject of Sclavis’s highly acclaimed 2002 recording Napoli’s Walls. This time Sclavis looks at a broader range of the artist’s in situ collages from Ramallah to Rome, in search of “a dynamic, a movement that will give birth to a rhythm, a…
M.R.C.S.
Original 1991 LP edition. Singer, harmonica virtuoso, and keyboardist Karen Mantler has inherited her father, Michael Mantler's sense of whimsy and her mother, Carla Bley's musical fearlessness -- not to mention her electric-shredded-wheat hairstyle. Although Mantler's debut album was produced by Bley and new husband Steve Swallow and features fellow avant-jazz offspring Eric Mingus as co-lead vocalist and Jonathan Sanborn on bass, 1989's My Cat Arnold isn't quite jazz, but it's not exactly pop …
Bayou
*2024 stock* A fresh and open music, delicate and space-conscious, is shaped as drummer Thomas Strønen and Ayumi Tanaka, previously heard in the ensemble Time Is A Blind Guide on Lucus, resurface in a new trio with clarinettist/singer/percussionist Marthe Lea. The group first came together at Oslo’s Royal Academy of Music, where for two years the players would meet each week for exploratory music making. Strønen: “We always played freely- drifting between elements of contemporary classical music…
Lucus
*2024 stock* Norwegian drummer/composer Thomas Strønen presents a revised edition of his acoustic collective Time Is A Blind Guide, now trimmed to quintet size, and with a new pianist in Wakayama-born Ayumi Tanaka. Tanaka has spoken of seeking associative connections between Japan and Norway in her improvising, a tendency Strønen seems to be encouraging with his space-conscious writing for the ensemble, letting in more light. As on the group’s eponymously-titled and critically-lauded debut album…
Skala
*2024 stock* Mathias Eick’s intensely melodic trumpet occupies the centre-stage in this album of self-penned tunes which will appeal to an audience beyond “jazz”. Against the powerful backdrops offered by his sleek, modern band, driven by two drummers, he delivers richly lyrical soliloquies.
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…
Wave Of Sorrow
*2024 stock* "An evocative, lyrical recording.... The two draw heavily on Slavic folk influences, even as they mine the kind of airy, contemplative jazz harmonies associated with the ECM school." - David R. Adler, AllMusicWave of Sorrow is an album by Soviet-Norwegian jazz pianist Mikhail Alperin and Russian brass player Arkady Shilkloper recorded in July 1989 and released on ECM the following year.
Up And Coming
*2024 stock* Guitarist John Abercrombie – who has recorded as a leader for ECM since 1974 – returns with a second album by his quartet featuring Marc Copland on piano, along with longtime rhythm partners Drew Gress and Joey Baron. Extolling 39 Steps, the group’s 2013 album, the Financial Times said: “The emphasis is on subtle intrigue, flowing lyricism and the interplay between the leader’s warm, cleanly articulated guitar and Copland’s piano… with bassist Gress and drummer Baron equally supple …