After three acclaimed ECM recordings with Louis Sclavis (Sources, Salt and Silk Melodies, and Characters on a Wall), each of them attesting his improvisational resourcefulness, French pianist Benjamin Moussay was invited to record a solo album. Promontoire is the result, a ...
Genre: Instrumental
Subgenre: Piano
Digitally remastered! With 80/81, Pat Metheny took one step closer to his dream of working with The Prophet of Freedom (a dream he finally achieved with 1985’s Song X), and what better company than Coleman alumni Charlie Haden and Dewey Redman, both fresh off the boat of Keith Jarrett’s newly defunct American Quartet and both ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier has long been a creative presence on ECM recordings, heard with the groups of Anouar Brahem (on Le pas du chat noir and Le voyage de Sahar), Louis Sclavis (Dans la nuit) and François Couturier (Nostalghia, Tarkovsky Quartet), as well as in duo with Marco Ambrosini ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Mainstream Jazz
Along with the work of CODONA, Magico is perhaps a forerunner in what would come to be known as “world music,” and a pinnacle among ECM’s fruitful productions of the 1970s. Although the talents assembled could hardly be more geographically disparate, their musical heartbeats trace the same calm graph across the EKG paper that is our ...
Along with the work of CODONA, Magico is perhaps a forerunner in what would come to be known as “world music,” and a pinnacle among ECM’s fruitful productions of the 1970s. Although the talents assembled could hardly be more geographically disparate, their musical heartbeats trace the same calm graph across the EKG paper that is our ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Free Jazz
If you’ve ever desired a Pat Metheny Group greatest hits album, then Travels is for you. Compiled from the group’s touring activities in 1982, this double set is a must-have. From the glittering lotus of melody that is “San Lorenzo” to the even more effusive “Phase Dance,” the requisite classics are all here. We also get a curtailed, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Fusion
Jon Balke’s unique solo work blurs distinctions between composition, improvisation and sound design as Discourses further develops the methodology introduced with the Norwegian pianist’s Warp album. Integrated in the resonant sound of his piano music are “layered soundscapes” of processed material ...
Genre: Instrumental
Subgenre: Piano
Sun Bear Concerts Live (Remastered)
Sun Bear Concerts - documenting five complete solo performances by Keith Jarrett in Japan - counts as a milestone achievement in the history of jazz recording. As Down Beat wrote, on the occasion of the original release, Jarrett’s improvisations are “the inventions of a giant, overpoweringly intimate in the way they can ...
Composer: Keith Jarrett
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Take one look at the thoughtful cover art of this seminal Keith Jarrett release, and you’ll gain immediate insight into what makes his trio click. Each curvaceous line brings a lifetime of movement, of study, and of passion to bear on the music at hand. And with these six standards resurrected to ...
Composer: Keith Jarrett
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Cyrillus Kreek - The Suspended Harp of Babel
The Suspended Harp of Babel features revelatory performances of the choral music of Estonian composer Cyrillus Kreek (1889-1962). Kreek’s pieces, incorporating graceful settings of psalms and folk hymns, are juxtaposed here with instrumental fantasias and interludes created for this ...
Composer: Cyrillus Kreek (1889-1962)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Choral
Tales of Another is an album by American bassist Gary Peacock featuring Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette recorded in 1977 and released on the ECM label. The album marks the first recording by the group who later became well known as Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio. ...
Composer: Keith Jarrett
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Ludwig van Beethoven - The Piano Sonatas
The Beethoven sonatas can be logically divided into three distinct groups: early, middle and late. To me, playing them in chronological order is most convincing and deeply satisfying. Among the thirty-two there is not one weak link. And this way the listener is able to follow the process of evolution, step by step. ...
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Instrumental
Charismatic trumpeter Avishai Cohen launched his exuberant, home-grown band Big Vicious six years ago, after relocating from the US to his native Israel, rounding up players to shape the music from the ground up, and co-authoring much of its newest material together with them. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Wolfgang Muthspiel, whom The New Yorker has called “a shining light” among today’s jazz guitarists, returns to the trio format with Angular Blues, the Austrian’s fourth ECM album as a leader, following two acclaimed quintet releases and his trio debut.
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary 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
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
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
