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
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
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
Common Practice (Live At The Village Vanguard / 2017)
The latest ECM album to feature pianist Ethan Iverson – following last year’s duo recording with saxophonist Mark Turner, Temporary Kings, and two lauded discs with the Billy Hart Quartet – presents the Brooklyn-based artist at the head of his own quartet in a program of standards and blues, recorded live at Manhattan’s famed Village Vanguard. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
The Danish String Quartet's Grammy-nominated Prism project links Bach fugues, late Beethoven quartets and works by modern masters. In volume two of the series, Bach's Fugue in Bb minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier (in the arrangement by Viennese composer Emanuel Aloys Förster) ...
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Chamber Music
Playing The Room bears testimony to the long musical friendship of Avishai Cohen and Yonathan Avishai. They began to explore jazz as teenagers in Tel Aviv, and have continued to play together over many years, with Yonathan making important contributions to Avishai’s group albums Into The Silence and Cross My Palm With Silver on ECM. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
