The only archive reviewing every ECM album in existence.
Promotional samplers are made with an expiration date hidden inside them. They announce new releases, then yield to the next campaign. The four rare ECM/Polydor records gathered under the “New Music” banner have resisted that planned obsolescence. Originally pressed for radio stations and in-store programming, they now reach us as documents of a label defining [ ]
A sampler is supposed to be an index with music attached, a practical device for turning curiosity into sales. ECM’s eleven official sampler albums, issued between 1978 and 1982, are stranger objects. They advertise a catalogue, certainly, but they also interpret it. Each sequence makes an argument about what may belong beside what, allowing jazz, [ ]
The three-LP box set Guitar Music from ECM, released in 1981, was conceived by ECM’s French branch as more than a sampler. Coordinated by Hans Wendl and Gérard Desfoux, it gathers seven guitarists whose six- and twelve-string vocabularies had already helped make the Munich label resistant to category. Just over a decade old, ECM had nearly [ ]
Eternity and a Year gathers music from ECM’s 2002 production year, the label’s 33rd, when more than 40 recordings appeared. The double album forms a two-way mirror. Disc 1 returns the listener’s altered image; Disc 2 stands behind the glass, observing that reflection and discovering its afterlife. Jazz and classical music become opposed memories: one improvises [ ]
This rare ECM sampler from 2008 gathers selections from the label’s fourth decade of existence, yet the sequence feels less retrospective than prophetic. Its selections cross successive thresholds, revealing musicians at the moment when technique blurs into vision. Producer Manfred Eicher’s gift has often involved recognizing those latent selves, then constructing the acoustic conditions in [ ]
“Sit down and give this a proper listen!” So proclaims the booklet accompanying this obscure compilation from the Netherlands. Released in 1990 by ECM Records in collaboration with Hi-Five, its purpose is to draw from the label’s catalogue to gauge the quality of home system loudspeakers and amplifiers. The resulting “test CD” pays tribute to [ ]
ECM Autumn Highlights is a sampler curated by Manfred Eicher and released in collaboration with the Italian magazine Musica Jazz. Drawing from ECM’s late-2017 catalogue, it covers a broad expressive range while retaining the sense of a single, carefully plotted journey. The Vijay Iyer Sextet opens with “Poles,” also the first track on Far From Over (ECM 2581). Saxophonist [ ]
A retrospective included with the August 2022 issue of Musica Jazz, tracing the distinct, bittersweet trumpet voice of the late Polish master across a slew of ECM recordings. The title Songs seems almost provocatively plain for an artist whose music could turn breath into a philosophical emergency. His trumpet worried at a composition’s hidden seam until grief entered the [ ]
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyondE. E. Cummings Released with the December 2021 issue of Musica Jazz, this compilation traces Carla Bley’s compositions and arrangements across the ECM and WATT universes. Some performances feature Bley herself; others entrust her music to artists who understood her impact. Her pieces migrate between ensembles and disclose chambers hidden [ ]
This 2014 Musica Jazz sampler approaches the art of compilation as a meta-statement rather than an inventory, offering four paired selections from albums by the Gary Burton Quartet, Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie, Sam Rivers, and the Miroslav Vitous Group. Keith Jarrett’s “Runes,” from Arbour Zena (ECM 1070), occupies the center as a ritual hinge. Burton opens the first [ ]