Late one night in January 1975, the pianist Keith Jarrett sat down at the Cologne Opera House’s Bösendorfer piano and improvised an unbroken thread of music that absorbed everything from country to gospel, smeared through with French impressionism. The recording, The Köln Concert, marked a classic milestone in 1970s jazz and the vinyl carried three significant letters, ‘ECM’. Editions of Contemporary Music had been founded in Munich five years previously by Manfred Eicher, initially to record exiled American musicians in Europe. Through its sophisticated sleeve art, exquisite resonance and pioneering artists, ECM would become an enduring influence on contemporary music.
Few record companies have achieved such an aesthetic reputation. Of course Eicher is guarded about pinning down an ECM aesthetic, ‘that’s a job for the critic, but whether it’s useful is an open question.’ He dislikes the idea that ECM has ever pushed a minimalist aesthetic. ‘We aim to focus upon essentials but that rather translates into clarity.’ Eicher is instead keen to stress the freedom that his label maintains, within a congested industry. ‘We are freer because we don’t speculate on trends and possible reception while documenting the music. It’s a purely artistic process.’ Yet there has always been an incredible sense of vision. The label’s early slogan was famously ‘the most beautiful sound next to silence’: ‘That was our leitmotif for a while, intended playfully, since John Cage had already proven that silence cannot really exist. It was a challenging guideline at the beginning.’
ECM’s luminous ambience, a texture in itself, changed the face of jazz. How has ECM managed, then and now, to produce such a sound? Eicher’s absolute immersion in the production process is key. ‘The approach has always been to capture the music as faithfully as possible. But the needs of the music change constantly,’ Eicher observes. ‘You cannot step into the same production twice; the resonance will always be different. As producer, I am attempting to illuminate the potential of a musical performance.’ The idea of location is also an integral part of the process. ‘A room has to inspire the musician either by its resonance, its architecture or at best by a certain spirit.’
The label’s legacy lies in its geographical expansion of jazz — the haunting sound of Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, the extended virtuosity of American guitarist Pat Metheny and the colour shifts of Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stánko have all become ECM trademarks as much as Jarrett’s solo concerts. ‘One way or another we’re interested in the places where the rivers meet. Usually the most interesting things happen at the edges of the traditions, idioms and geographical regions.’ One obsession of ECM, in its exploration of the margins, has been in documenting free improvisation, from the fierce intensity of The Art Ensemble of Chicago through to the more cerebral projects of the British saxophonist Evan Parker. Since so much of the beauty is in the moment, how does Eicher hope to capture this on record? ‘The more you listen, the more clearly the music’s freely created structure will become,’ Eicher explains. ‘For the most part the free improvisers we have recorded consider improvisation to be a ‘compositional’ work method.’
ECM’s forays into composed music are particularly interesting. In 1984 Eicher founded ECM New Series for composers. The first release on the new imprint, Tabula Rasa, embraced the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, a proponent of the ‘New Simplicity’, the late 20th century spiritual Minimalism that emerged from the former Soviet bloc. Eicher disagrees over this term. ‘I heard Pärt as a completely independent composer, not as a representative of any movement.’ But the ways in which Pärt crafts the timbres of organs, bells and voices into a concentrated resonance, sit very comfortably with the label’s underlying melancholy.
Critics of Eicher’s label often highlight the way ECM crafted a sophisticated, even cultish identity for itself amidst the confusion of 70s jazz. And in many ways ECM is a considerable marketing success. Eicher remains insistent that the label’s catalogue itself defies ideology. Despite criticisms of ECM’s Northern European ethos, this is certainly a truly remarkable aspect of ECM’s output. Perhaps the beauty of Eicher’s project lies in its ability to marry adventurous art with commercial performance. What is important, Eicher stresses, is his devotion to production values that defy mass consumption. ‘We carry on, one album at a time.’
