ECM Summer Campaign
Where The River Goes
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, recorded at Stu…
Characters On A Wall
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, an emotion, a …
Midwest
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 influenced b…
Life Goes On
A striking album of new music from pianist/composer Carla Bley, whose trio with Andy Sheppard and Steve Swallow is now in its 25th year. Individual associations among the players go back much further: bassist Swallow first recorded music by Carla in 1961. So when Bley says “Life Goes On”, a lot of life is alluded to. The album, realized in the Auditorio Stelio Molo Studio in Lugano in May 2019, with Manfred Eicher producing, takes the form of three suites. The title piece begins as a stoical blu…
Big Vicious
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, and that be…
Romaria
*2024 stock* Andy Sheppard’s quartet extends the musical explorations begun on the 2015 release Surrounded By Sea, an album praised by Télérama for its “poignant serenity.” In this new programme of compositions by Sheppard (plus the title track by Brazilian singer-songwriter Renato Teixeira), the drones and washes of Eivind Aarset’s guitar and electronics – aided by the generous acoustics of Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI – help to establish a climate in which improvisation can take place. T…
Belonging
Tip! "Belonging is a studio album by American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, recorded over two days in April 1974 and released on ECM later that year—the debut of Jarrett's "European Quartet", featuring saxophonist Jan Garbarek and rhythm section Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen. Because Jarrett's contract with ABC/Impulse! prevented him from performing with the quartet under his own name, the group became known as the 'Belonging' quartet." - Wikipedia
Alien
Original 1985 LP edition. This one is a bit of an outlier. More a showcase for keyboardist Don Preston’s (The Mothers Of Invention) array of 1980s synthesizers and drum machines than a jazz album. As the story goes composer Michael Mantler wrote this music for a conventional orchestra with the solo trumpet part, but then decided to transpose orchestral partitions to Preston’s gadgetry. It is not known if this move was informed by the budgetary constraint or perhaps creative or even financial inc…
Antenna
Antenna showcases David Virelles’ mastery in fusing Afro-Cuban spirituality with avant-garde innovation. This reissue highlights its hypnotic rhythms and spectral harmonies.
Pat Metheny Group
The self‑titled Pat Metheny Group album is the moment an idea becomes a band. Emerging in the late 1970s, Pat Metheny Group arrive with a sound that feels fully sketched yet still buzzing with first‑chapter urgency. Pat Metheny’s guitar speaks in a clear, ringing voice that draws as much from Midwestern folk and rock radio as from bebop lineage, while the writing leans into expansive song forms rather than head‑solo‑head orthodoxy. The result is a music that sounds like it grew up on wide horizo…
Za Górami
Vocalist and violinist Alice Zawadzki makes her ECM leader debut with Za Górami ("beyond the mountains"), a luminous and deeply personal song-cycle that gathers melodies from across the folk traditions of Central and Eastern Europe, the Sephardic and Yiddish diaspora, Ladino balladry and her own original writing. Sung in a remarkable range of languages, the album feels less like a recital than a series of half-remembered lullabies and incantations, carried on Zawadzki's pure, weightless voice an…
Le pas du chat noir
One of ECM's best-loved albums: oud master Anouar Brahem in a hushed, nocturnal trio with piano and accordion, dissolving Arabic music, European chamber music and jazz into pure melody and space. A modern classic.
Blue Maqams
On Blue Maqams, oud master Anouar Brahem brings his instrument into the very heart of the modern jazz tradition, recording in New York with a band of genuine giants. Bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette and pianist Django Bates meet Brahem's Arabic maqam vocabulary on its own terms, translating its modal subtleties into the elastic swing, deep groove and open interplay of the highest level of jazz. Holland and DeJohnette, who have decades of shared history, provide a foundation that is …
Touch of Time
Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen and pianist Harmen Fraanje in a duo of whispers: fragile melodies, ghostly vocals, electronic shadows and open silence. Ambient, melancholy and deeply atmospheric.
Return To Forever
Chick Corea's luminous 1972 classic that launched a movement, with Stanley Clarke, Airto Moreira, Flora Purim and Joe Farrell. Sunlit Brazilian melody and weightless groove; a founding ECM statement.
In Praise of Dreams
Jan Garbarek crafts a brooding, electronic-tinged song without words, with violist Kim Kashkashian and drummer Manu Katché. Spacious, hypnotic and cinematic; ambient chamber music, unmistakably ECM.
Places
A cornerstone of the early Nordic ECM sound: Jan Garbarek's keening saxophone over shifting, atmospheric backdrops, with John Taylor, Bill Connors and Jack DeJohnette. Glacial, majestic, carved from northern light.
Officium
ECM's landmark cross-over: Jan Garbarek's saxophone improvising around medieval and Renaissance chant sung by The Hilliard Ensemble, recorded in a monastery. Sublime, meditative and utterly unclassifiable.
Swallow Tales
Guitarist John Scofield offers a warm and affectionate tribute to a lifelong friend and mentor on Swallow Tales, an album devoted entirely to the compositions of the great electric bassist Steve Swallow. Joined by Swallow himself and by longtime drummer Bill Stewart, Scofield revisits a songbook he has known intimately for half a century, having first studied with Swallow as a young musician. The trio recorded the whole set in a single relaxed day, and that spontaneity is audible in every track:…
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
On this absorbing recording Keith Jarrett steps away from jazz entirely to interpret the Württemberg Sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, performed on clavichord. Best known for his groundbreaking improvised concerts and his luminous jazz quartets and trios, Jarrett has long maintained a parallel life as a serious interpreter of notated keyboard music, and here he turns to one of the most adventurous composers of the eighteenth century. C.P.E. Bach's writing is famously restless and expressive,…