Horizons Touched: The Music of Ecm [ハードカバー]

It has been 35 years since Manfred Eicher's brilliant ECM label released Gary Burton's and Chick Corea's wonderful collaboration Crystal Silence. It is 38 years since the label was first launched. .

Since then, ECM has created and released so vast and extraordinary a collection of music - path breaking improvisational music, often jazz that does not swing -- that adventurous jazz lovers have come to know the "ECM sound." Over its lifetime so far, it has released the work of a huge range of artists, including these extraordinary albums: Oregon, Dave Holland's Prime Directive, Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert, John Abercrombie's Timeless, Kenny Wheeler's Angel Song, Trygve Seim's Different Rivers, Ralph Towner's and Gary Burton's Matchbook, and Art Lande & Mark Isham's Rubisa Patrol.

When the Portland Jazz Festival honored the anniversary of Crystal Silence's release in February, 2007, listeners, critics and ECM representatives spent hours in lively seminars seeking words to define this ECM Sound. For me, that sound is usually abstract, pristinely clear and spare in production, often with the disciplined ambiance of chamber music, and always original. ECM is deservedly an award winning label. The Jazz Journalists Association has voted ECM the 2007 "Record Label of the Year" in its 11th Annual Jazz Awards. The Association is an international group comprised of more than 450 writers, editors, photographers, broadcasters, filmmakers, educators and other media professionals. ECM Records was also voted "Label of the Year 2007" at the MIDEM Classical Awards in Cannes. As unique and compelling as the ECM Sound is, its cover art is equally identifiable and moving.

In Horizons Touched, Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths have collected many of these images, illuminated by many statements from artists and others associated with the label, as well as those of experts contributing essays to explore aspects of the label's wide-ranging catalog. Together with shorter contributions from more than 100 musicians, 20 essays and interviews explore the ECM ethos, be it in European or American jazz, folk, experimental fare or moving fusions of genres. Design, sound engineering, film and photography and other non-musical aspects of ECM are also explored. Some pieces are analytical or historical, others are anecdotal, philosophical, or jazzily idiosyncratic. Cover and other images are sprinkled generously throughout.

The book is stunning and enriching, and will be welcomed by fans and newbies alike. It is pricey, but handsome; for anyone interested, it lives up to its cost.

This is a powerful book. In its own quiet and persistent way it has unlocked a whole new realm of musical experience for me. Over the last thirty years I have been mainly listening to classical music and gradually a sprinkling of ECM recordings migrated into my collection. First I setted on Jarret's Bach recordings and later on I explored some of the contemporary Russians (Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Silvestrov, Kancheli). Maybe the first recording that occupied a special, jarring, unclassifiable position was Meredith Monk's "Mercy" (which I wouldn't have bought if it wouldn't have fallen for a fire sale price in my hands). However, up to that point ECM's profile didn't have clear contours for me: it was offbeat, serious (even to the point of austerity) and seemed to center on a zeitgeisty musical canon of melancholy and loss.

Then a friend introduced me to Brad Mehldau and I got hooked on contemporary jazz trios and solo piano. This led me to some of the protagonists of Nordic jazz and soon the ECM contingent in my collection was mushrooming: Bobo Stenson, Tord Gustavson, Ketil Bjornstadt. I followed the lead into Stefano Bollani, Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stanko and I started to be very grateful to Manfred Eicher, the leading light behind ECM. It was around that time, about two years ago, that "Horizons Touched" ended up on my bookshelf. Originally I perused the book as a catalogue, in search of new jazz repertoire. But reading some of the short written contributions by ECM musicians and other close associates whilst being exposed more intensely to the ECM sound, I started to have an inkling of the full breadth of Eicher's project.

I understand now that ECM is not in the first place a record label. The business aspect really is tangential to Eicher's venture. I know it sounds presumptuous but one could say that ECM itself is a work of art that emerges at the intersection of three key elements.

First there is the observation that ECM is not a business that is governed by fixed contractual relations with its its roster of musicians but a community rallying first and foremost around a shared vision on music. Albums are made on a project basis, driven by "a desire for it to exist, not by a desire that it should sell". Hence, "the artist is no longer the commodity, it is the music that leads" (p. 89).

Then, the musical vision seems to rely on a significant extent on the basic idea of "improvisation", on the ability to let the music unfold in the moment within only rudimentary formal constraints. Hence the origin of ECM in free jazz and later folk. As the spirit of improvisation has never been purely entertainment, this is consistent with the idea of "community" rather than "commodity". It is about a fundamental reverence for what is, for what we as fallible human beings can do, together. ECM stretches the ethos of improvisation, surprisingly, into the realm of "classical" music, traditionally so dominated by the rethoric of literal authenticity and by the logic of being subservient to the tyrannical wish of the composer. ECM responds by bringing back the excitement in classical music-making by putting musicians in the studio side-to-side with living composers who consider themselves not as a sort of independent entity providing the world with fifth symphonies and magical rings of operas. For Gideon Lewensohn, for example, composing is "not too far from preparing a good minestrone for people you like after choosing the ingredients in an open-air market." And he goes on: "my personal working encounter with ECM, and its Manfred, offer me a `table' for which it makes sense to prepare another work of music" (p. 311). Likewise, ECM attracts musicians that are not wedded to their image as star virtuoso performer but are willing to admit that "we are not so important" (Andras Schiff on p. 97) from which follows an interpretative honesty and a creative freedom that is able to shed new light, even on works that are firmly entrenched in the canon of classical masterworks.

And then there is the third element, "the ECM sound", about which a lot of ink has already been spilled. Whatever attributes associated with it - "transparant", "clear", "spacious" - for me its greatest quality is that it is a lively, authoritative sound: it draws one in the music, it commands to be listened to, it is an invitation to break free from the status of passive recipient. Instead of "consuming" music the sound beckons to actively retrace (or rather co-create) the moment-to-moment unfolding of a musical process that finds its origin in the breath of fragile, fallible human beings. And how much more rewarding as a listening experience this is! Again it is entirely in the ECM spirit that this signature sound emerges quite naturally: apparently most sessions comprise just two or three days of recording and one or two days of mixing, often without the aid of computer automation.

The animating force behind all this is Manfred Eicher. Entrepreneur, mediator, producer, composer, artist: he is the spider in the web and the guardian of the vision. A complex, multifariously refracted images about what Eicher really "does" emerges out of "Horizons Touched". He seems to do a lot and very little at the same time. In recording sessions he is able to get what he wants by energising the atmosphere, listening, listening very intently and communicating his intentions by a gaze or just a few enigmatic words. But his involvement can lead him to get down into the arrangements too. Bobo Stenson tells a story about the recording of "Serenity" (it's not in the book) about Eicher actually sitting down behind the drums and playing (which has found its way onto the recording as a track titled "More Cymbals" after a common expression Eicher tends to use in the studio). Paul Griffiths, one of the lead editors of the volume, writes a quirky homage to Eicher (who is not explicity named in the piece) in the form of an imaginary dialogue and it starts as follows: "What does he do? Nothing. Nothing? He's there with you. That's what it is and that's all what it is. This, then, is how it goes. You do what you have to do - play, sing, speak - but you'll do it now in a way you could never have done before, without him being there, and that, as it well may be, you could never do again ... "

All of this leads me to understand that ECM is a fragile, breathing whole. It is predicated on honesty, trust, on the quality of human relationships. And out of that basic given emerges something beautiful that draws other people in and energises the world around it. Isn't this what "art" is supposed to do?

And so it came that these recordings, formerly occupying a peripheral place in my music collection, now offer the inevitable prism through which I am listening to all music. Powerful stuff, this book.

The ECM label (as well as the now defunct sister label, JAPO) has always had an air of mystery about it. They have a huge catalog, few of which are ever out of print or unavailable. Most of the earlier, seminal issues had no liner notes whatsoever - just incredible, impactful cover art or graphics to complement the music. The advent of the Internet allowed Googling of the artists, to learn a bit more about those who create or produce the music.

Now we have this second book (the first being the just lovely Sleeves of Desire) to shed light on this most creative music label. And what a beautiful work of art this book is - loads of recreations of album covers, a nice logical flow, but mostly snippets (never enough, of course, for we who are and have been addicted to the label for many years) from or about the artists who make all of that compelling music.