ECM special
Temporary Kings
*2024 stock* With Temporary Kings two of the most distinct voices on today’s jazz scene present their debut on record as a duo. Engaging in inspired dialogue Mark Turner and Ethan Iverson here explore aesthetic common ground in the atmosphere of a modernist chamber music-like setting at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano. The saxophonist and the pianist had begun their association in the Billy Hart Quartet, where the two players featured sympathetically on two ECM albums by that band.
The ne…
Human
In its review of pianist Shai Maestro’s ECM leader debut The Dream Thief, All About Jazz spoke of “a searching lyrical atmosphere, emotional eloquence and communal virtuosity that serves the music.” All of which also applies to Human, where Maestro’s outgoing, highly-communicative band with fellow Israeli Ofri Nemya on drums and Peruvian bassist Jorge Roeder becomes a quartet with the inspired addition of US trumpeter Philip Dizack. Shai’s expansive pianism is well-matched by Dizack’s alert, …
Free At Last - Extended Edition
Revisited and remastered, with additional takes, texts and photos, here is the very first ECM session, recorded in Ludwigsburg in November 1969, featuring the great American pianist Mal Waldron, whose resume included work with Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy and Billie Holiday. In his original liner notes, Mal wrote: “This album represents my meeting with free jazz. Free jazz for me does not mean complete anarchy… You will hear me playing rhythmically instead of soloing on chord changes.” As Jazz Journ…
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…
Conspiracy
A new ECM studio album and a programme of new music from Terje Rypdal is cause for celebration. On Conspiracy the great Norwegian guitarist seems to reconnect with the wild inspiration that fuelled such early masterpieces as Whenever I Seem To Be Far Away, Odyssey and Waves, exploring the sonic potential of the electric guitar with both a rock improviser’s love of raw energy and a composer’s feeling for space and texture. Keyboardist Ståle Storløkken, who contributed to Terje’s Vossabrygg and Cr…
End To End
*2024 stock* Barre Phillips was the first musician to record an album of solo double bass, back in 1968, and he has always been an absolute master of the solo idiom. In March 2017, Barre recorded what he says will be his last solo album, the final chapter of his “Journal Violone”: it is a beautiful and moving musical statement. All the qualities we associate with Barre’s playing are here in abundance – questing adventurousness, melodic invention, textural richness, developmental logic, and dee…
Last Decade
German-American pianist Benjamin Lackner makes his highly melodious ECM debut with an all-star quartet of trumpeter Mathias Eick, the esteemed Manu Katché on drums and bassist Jérôme Regard. Mathias and Manu share an extensive recording history with ECM and their respectively unique instrumental signatures can be traced across this set of exclusively original material – eight pieces by Benjamin, one by Jérôme. The bassist and the leader’s partnership goes all the way back to 2002, when, in New Y…
Uneasy
Vijay Iyer presents a powerful new trio, in which he is joined by two key figures in creative music, Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh. “We have an energy together that is very distinct. It has a different kind of propulsion, a different impulse and a different spectrum of colours”. Repertoire on UnEasy, recorded at Oktaven Audio Studio in Mount Vernon, New York in December 2019, includes Iyer originals written over a span of 20 years, plus Geri Allen’s “Drummer’s Song” and a radical recasting…
I Took Up The Runes
One of the Norwegian saxophonists most outgoing dates, the best-selling “Runes” also marked the first appearance of Manu Katché with the Jan Garbarek group. Centerpiece of the album is the five-part “Molde Canticle”.
The Gleaners
*2024 stock* Larry Grenadier’s The Gleaners is a profound and highly creative album, harvesting influences from many sources, its title inspired by Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I. In between his own pieces here, including a dedication to early hero Oscar Pettiford, Grenadier explores compositions by George Gershwin, John Coltrane, Paul Motian, Rebecca Martin and Wolfgang Muthspiel. “The process for making this record began with a look inward,” Larry writes in his liner note, “an excavatio…
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…
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…
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 …
Life Goes On
*2024 stock* 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 …
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…
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…