The Colin Vallon Trio has found its own space in the crowded world of the piano trio by quietly challenging its conventions. On its third ECM album Vallon again leads the group not with virtuosic solo display but by patient outlining of melody and establishing of frameworks in which layered group improvising can take place. Reviewing the group’s 2014 release Le Vent, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
To the Rising Moon is Stephan Micus’ 26th solo album for ECM. It features instruments from Colombia, India, Xinjiang (China), Bavaria, Cambodia, Egypt and Borneo, which have never before been combined in one composition. People often call themselves a multi-instrumentalist when they play three or four instruments, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Crossover Jazz
It must be considered a stroke of good fortune that these three musicians have come together: On double bass, the Swede Anders Jornim, one of the most essential bass players on the European jazz scene with eight albums as bandleader for ECM and a packed artistic CV with tours and recordings alongside legends ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Beethoven: The Piano Concertos
Alexander Lonquich, one of the foremost performers in chamber music and as a soloist, has said that “every encounter with a work of art is at the same time an exploration of one's own existential position. This is the only way to make music today.” The New York Times has called him “an original at the piano who features both orderliness and suppleness”, ...
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Concertos
The Old Country (Live at the Deer Head Inn)
Keith Jarrett’s recordings from the Deer Head Inn have a special place among his recordings devoted to explorations of jazz standards and the American songbook. And The Old Country is a document of particular historical significance, from several perspectives. ...
Composer: Keith Jarrett (1945)
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
For her first solo-violoncello album on ECM’s New Series, Anja Lechner devotes herself to a particularly unique convergence of three composers from vastly different contexts: JS Bach, Carl Friedrich Abel and Tobias Hume. In the past, her extensive discography has captured the cellist as part of the renowned Rosamunde Quartett, as well as ...
Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), Carl Friedrich Abel (1723-1787), Tobias Hume (1569-1645)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Instrumental
"Little Big III", the third studio album from his band Little Big featuring guitarist Greg Tuohey, bassist David Ginyard Jr., and drummer Jongkuk Kim. Little Big III is the second album that Parks has recorded on Blue Note as a bandleader, following 2008’s Invisible Cinema, a powerfully modern, post-genre concept for improvised music in the 21st century that recently ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Five years after the release of his album “Joys and Solitudes” on ECM, pianist Yonathan Avishai is back on jazz&people, the label that discovered him. Celebrating a decade of fertile collaboration with his trio, with Yoni Zelnik on double bass and Donald Kontomanou on drums, the musician releases “Shapes and Sounds” an album in which he magnifies everything ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
In blazing form, the trumpeter from Tel Aviv responds to the turbulent spirit of a troubled time, leading his dedicated band through a five-part suite that runs the gamut of emotions, by turns hopeful, despairing, outraged and profoundly melancholic. The melodic directness of the concluding “The Seventh”, composed by ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
After tackling the sonatas for violin and piano of Bach, Busoni and Beethoven in 2017 – a “thoughtfully determined and subtly interconnected programme” according to Strad magazine –, the duo of Yuuko Shiokawa and András Schiff returns with striking renditions of Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1 and Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 2. When the ....
Composer: Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Robert Schumann (1840-1856)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Instrumental
With Seeing, Tord Gustavsen begins an intricate new chapter in his series of acclaimed trio recordings, initiated in 2003 with Changing Places – an album that is today considered a classic. The new recording with its compact, concentrated song forms „reflects my personal development as I get older, going for the essentials in life and music“, says the Norwegian pianist. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Four years after releasing their last album, Pericopes+1 return with an inventive new concept album of futuristic reflections on the present: “Good Morning World”. The 2024 release celebrates ten years of touring for this acclaimed Italian sax/piano/drums project whose style would best be described as “crossover jazz” by the international press ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Having previously joined forces on several Louis Sclavis recordings for ECM, including the clarinettist’s last acclaimed album Characters On A Wall, more recently pianist Benjamin Moussay and Sclavis have increasingly shifted their focus onto two-way communication, playing expansive and well-received duo sets throughout Europe. Deutschlandfunk reported on one of ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Idiosyncratic, large-scale and in its fundamental disposition one of a kind, Florian Weber’s Imaginary Cycle, conceived for the unique instrumentation of brass ensemble and piano, is a hybrid of multiple musical languages that seamlessly blends the harmonious with the oblique. Here Weber presents a cycle in four parts, bookended by an ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
On Our Time saxophonist Trygve Seim and accordionist Frode Haltli rekindle their longstanding partnership (the duo will have played together a quarter century in 2025) in a programme of thought-provoking improvised and composed material, the Ukrainian lullaby “Oy Khodyt’ Son, Kolo Vikon” and North-Indian traditional “Shyama Sundara Madena ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Collected on our travels and taught to us by our friends, these are songs we have learnt and loved together. Gathered from Argentina, France, Venezuela, Poland and the deep well of Sephardic culture, these folk tales speak to the moon, the mountains, the rain, the madness of humans and the prophecies of birds. – Alice, Fred and Misha ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
The Danish String Quartet’s new album is a “retracing of musical pathways across the North Sea, a journey through the sounds of traditional music from Northern Europe, taking us from Denmark and Norway to the Faroe Islands, and to Ireland and England.” It follows on from Last Leaf, the Danish String Quartet’s much-loved 2017 release, which was Classical Album of the Year at NPR ...
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Chamber Music
On their second ECM duo album Romanian pianist Lucian Ban and US violist Mat Maneri find fresh inspiration as they follow the trail of Béla Bartók, revisiting the folk music that spurred the imagination of the great Hungarian composer who, in the early 20th century, collected and transcribed numerous pieces from Transylvania. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Crossover Jazz
On their new album "Kammin Jaaretti," the renowned jazz trio Hot Heros craft mesmerizing forest jazz. Saxophonist Sami Sippola and double bassist Ville Rauhala have been navigating the depths of jazz together for over two decades. Originally part of the wild and unpredictable Black Motor, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
