Charles Lloyd has played the 150-year-old adobe theater in downtown Santa Barbara more often than any other venue, and more often than any other performer. Knowing that Marian Anderson sang there on February 14, 1940 makes it a sacred space for him. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
The small Baltic nation of Estonia is internationally renowned for its singing traditions. Though originally a defiant celebration of its own identity in the face of past adversity, it’s also a reflection of a country that’s been looking to the future with a new freewheeling assertiveness. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Vocal
Old-school musique concrete interludes and electronic add-ons mark the revered Ensemble’s masterly new album, which both summarises their unique career so far, and jumps boldly into the unknown. “The material for this album has been developed over a 4 year period. I wanted to somehow ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Modern Jazz
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”, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Here Be Dragons is the ECM debut of New York based, Tel Aviv born saxophonist Oded Tzur, a strikingly original player and musical storyeller. Tzur’s graceful and fluid tenor sax sound has been influenced by studies with bansuri master Hariprasad Chaurasia, and the concept of raga is ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
A funny thing happened to Joey Alexander over the past five years, a whirlwind period during which he became the most brilliantly precocious talent in jazz history—that is, a renowned festival and concert-hall headliner; the youngest musician ever nominated for a Grammy Award in a jazz category; and a media ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
These two extraordinary guitarists first met in an Oslo studio in January 2019. Having admired each other’s work for some time, they decided right there and then to record an electric guitar duet collaboration specifically to create a soundtrack for a classic Norwegian silent film. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Free Jazz
J.S. Bach: Sei Solo - The Sonatas and Partitas
Thomas Zehetmair, one of the great violinists of our time, re-visits the solo works of Bach, the summit of the violin repertory. Using period instruments, Zehetmair plays the music with vividness and intelligence to produce a recording that is deeply steeped in the music and at the same time original. ...
Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Chamber Music
Free At Last (Extended Edition Remastered)
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 ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Free Jazz
The appearance of the second album by Lumen Drones, ‘Umbra’, carries the status of a major event. Coming fully five years after the group’s startling, self-titled debut recording – released, in late 2015, on ECM Records – the long-awaited follow-up marks a significant leap forward....
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre:
A solo concert from Keith Jarrett - recorded at Munich’s Philharmonic Hall on July 16, 2016, on the last night of a tour - finds the great improvising pianist at a peak of invention. Creating a spontaneous suite of forms in the moment with the intuitive assurance of a master builder – ...
Genre: Instrumental
Subgenre: Piano
Not Far From Here introduces pianist Julia Hülsmann’s new group, in which her long-established working trio with Marc Muellbauer and Heinrich Köbberling (together now for 17 years) is expanded to a quartet with the addition of saxophonist Uli Kempendorff. In Kempendorff’s playing “both suppleness and unruliness are in ample supply”, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
The half-Polish, half-Norwegian quartet led by fiery alto saxophonist Maciej Obara is gaining ground as one of the most exciting groups on the contemporary jazz scene. Both the band and its ECM debut Unloved were awarded the Fryderyk Prize in Poland in 2018, and early in 2019 the Obara Quartet ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Dreamlife of Debris carries forward the story begun on Kit Downes’s Obsidian, extending and developing its processes and core ideas. But where Obsidian was (almost exclusively) a solo church organ album, part of Kit’s plan for Dreamlife was to put the organ in a broader context, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Crossover Jazz
Remember Me, My Dear (Live in Bellinzona / 2014)
25 years on from the release of Officium, the groundbreaking alliance of Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, comes Remember me, my dear, recorded during the final tour the group made in October 2014. The program is emblematic of the range of repertoire the Norwegian saxophonist and...
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Vocal
«Solo for Trio» is Atle Nymo’s first album under his own name, and at the ripe age of 42, the leader at first glance may appear as a late bloomer, a young veteran or possibly something in between. The truth, however, is slightly different....
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Modern Jazz
Accordionist and composer Frode Haltli follows up last year’s acclaimed Hubro release, ‘Avant Folk’, with a smaller-scale yet equally inspired album that is built once again on the combination of traditional Nordic folk forms with influences drawn from world music and contemporary composition/improvisation. ...
Genre: Folk
Subgenre:
Acclaimed guitarist Bill Frisell will release his Blue Note Records debut of his newest project HARMONY. Produced by his longtime collaborator Lee Townsend—and recorded by Tucker Martine at Flora Recording in Portland, Oregon—HARMONY features Frisell with a wholly distinctive quartet ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Vocal
With SuperBigmouth, the bassist and composer Chris Lightcap combines his two critically acclaimed ensembles, Bigmouth and Superette, into a powerhouse comprised of today’s most accomplished and celebrated musical figures. The groups’s ambitious, bold new recording is set for release...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Fusion
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. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
