Back with a newly formed quintet, gathered together for a particularly fruitful 2024 session in Southern France, the German-American pianist Benjamin Lackner now presents a different side of his composer-approach that should go a step further in exposing Lackner as a force to be reckoned with in the contemporary jazz world. Trumpeter Mathias Eick is the sole returnee from Lackner’s debut ...
Composer: Benjamin Lackner (1976)
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
A strikingly unorthodox album, with a unique sense of flow, Relations brings together kindred spirits from scattered compass points and traditions, and tells us something new about each of them. Conceived and realized over a four year period, the album is both a thoughtful collection of duos and solos and ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Recorded ten years ago in New York, and released now for the first time, Taking Turns is a snapshot of Jakob Bro’s music in a period of transition. In a chronological discography of Bro’s sessions, it would follow Gefion, the Danish guitarist’s leader debut for ECM, by a few months. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen, an ECM recording artist since 1970, presents his first-ever solo album. Characteristically broad in its musical scope and creative range, Landloper was recorded primarily at Oslo’s Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene. Choice of repertoire in this recital reflects on Arild’s musical journey, and, alongside original ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
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
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
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
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
Rekindling the familiarly flowing interplay with fellow travellers Thomas Morgan and João Lobo – the trio’s musical partnership goes back over a decade at this point –, on A New Day Italian pianist Giovanni Guidi moreover expands the group’s instrumental grasp with the introduction of American saxophonist James Brandon ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Outpost of Dreams introduces a new duo. Norma Winstone, as always quietly innovative as jazz singer and lyricist, brings her vocal subtlety and poetic sensibility to new pieces by Kit Downes, and to compositions by Carla Bley, Ralph Towner, and John Taylor. The programme is completed with fresh ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Vocal
