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
Recorded live at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica last November, this album documents the meeting of the doyen of Italian jazz, Enrico Rava, with Joe Lovano, masterful US tenorist of Sicilian heritage. Rava and Lovano front a spirited quintet that includes ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Universo Musical de Egberto Gismonti
Born in 1981, Brazilian guitarist Daniel Murray began his musical studies at an early age. After dedicating himself to the classical guitar, he studied the instrument and composition in Brazil and formed a duo with Paulo Porto Alegre, dedicated to modern and avant-garde repertoire for two guitars. ...
Genre: Guitar
Subgenre: Jazz
Just Music was the moniker for a rotating West German collective whose musical “happenings” were a nascent challenge to mainstream sociopolitical strictures. Although the classical training of these musicians is readily apparent from their technical prowess, the opening outburst tells us we’re in for something ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Free Jazz
It’s unfortunate that Adelhard Roidinger only cut this one record for ECM. The Austrian-born Renaissance man seems to have been a perfect fit for the label, which by the time of this release (1982) had firmly established its aesthetic hold on the jazz market. Schattseite has a lush, airy sound ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Werner Pirchner, Harry Pepl, Jack DeJohnette (Remastered)
Vastly under-recognized malleter and composer Werner Pirchner sharing the same studio with guitarist Harry Pepl and drummer Jack DeJohnette? What could go wrong? Quite a bit, unfortunately. The opening “Africa Godchild” starts intriguingly enough, seeming to creep from the soil like an awakening locust. Pirchner describes with his marimba the feelers ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
