In November 2021, bassist Arild Andersen brought his new quartet with saxophonist Marius Neset, pianist Helge Lien and drummer Håkon Mjåset Johansen to Oslo’s Rainbow Studio. Norway’s pandemic travel restrictions having ruled out the participation of Manfred Eicher on this occasion, the musicians were on their own, ostensibly to ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Evgueni Galperine’s ECM New Series debut is one of the most strikingly original and evocative albums of the year. A composer of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, living in Paris since 1990, Galperine is working with sound, texture and dynamics in new and powerfully expressive ways. As he explains, the sound world of Theory of Becoming represents an ...
Composer: Evgueni Galperine (1974)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Chamber Music
German-American pianist Benjamin Lackner makes his ECM debut with a star-studded quartet of Manu Katché on drums, trumpeter Mathias Eick and Jérôme Regard on bass. Mathias and Manu share a longstanding association with the label and their respectively unique instrumental signatures can be traced across this set of exclusively original material – eight pieces by Benjamin, one ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Bordeaux Concert documents a solo performance, the last that Keith Jarrett would give in France, at the Auditorium de l'Opéra National de Bordeaux on July 6, 2016, and finds the pianist at a creative high point. ...
Genre: Instrumental
Subgenre: Piano
Ruins and Remains, a suite for piano, string quartet and percussion, was composed by Wolfert Breferode in 2018, to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. Over time, however, it has come to embody meanings broader and more personal, with wide-ranging ...
Composer: Wolfert Breferode
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Crossover Jazz
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Piano Sonatas
The first complete recording of W.A. Mozart’s piano sonatas on the composer’s own fortepiano, performed by American pianist and Mozart-scholar Robert Levin. This comprehensive, 7-album-set also comprises unfinished fragments by the Austrian composer, here completed by Levin ...
Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 –1791)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Instrumental
Their collaboration has been hailed as a summit meeting of two jazz masters. Enrico Rava, trumpeter from Trieste, and Fred Hersch, pianist from Cincinatti, share a deep affection for the tradition and a profound sense for melodic invention. In this recording, with flugelhorn and piano glowing in the superb acoustic of the Lugano studio, Rava and Hersch explore some much-loved standards: ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
On ars moriendi Paul Giger looks at life’s flowing patterns, at death and renewal, as he brings together compositions by Bach and new music drawing inspiration from the work of painter Giovanni Segantini and Swiss folk traditions. The album was recorded in Maloja, where Segantini spent the last years of his life. ...
Composer: Paul Giger (1952), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Chamber Music
On The Next Door Julia Hülsmann returns with the quartet from 2019’s Not Far From Here, and presents her unique pianistic voice in a varied programme of almost exclusively original music, composed by herself and her colleagues – tenor saxophonist Uli Kempendorff, Marc Muellbauer on double bass and drummer Heinrich Köbberling. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre:
Heiner Goebbels: A House of Call - My Imaginary Notebook
A cycle of invocations, prayers, poems and songs for large orchestra, A House of Call incorporates recordings of sounds and voices from all over the world collected by Heiner Goebbels during his travels, research, and chance encounters. The cycle is a response to the history of these recordings and to their complexity, rawness and radiance. ...
Composer: Heiner Goebbels (1952)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Orchestral
The grandmaster of improvised bass and the electronics-playing son of Hungary’s great contemporary composer share a deep commitment to making new music in the moment, informed by their different lives and experiences. With his subtle use of synthesizers and digital percussion, György Kurtág Jr shapes shifting spaces for Barre Phillips to ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Drummer Gard Nilssen’s ECM leader debut follows acclaimed recordings for the label with the Maciej Obara Quartet. Elastic Wave presents Nilssen’s powerful trio with fellow Norwegian André Roligheten on reeds and Swedish bassist Petter Eldh (recently heard with Kit Downes). ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Hellbound Train: An Anthology (2022 Remaster)
Hellbound Train is a double-album retrospective from Steve Tibbetts with music selected by the US guitarist from 40 years of recordings on ECM . Neatly divided into electric and acoustic chapters, the anthology juxtaposes pieces originally featured on the albums Northern Song, Safe Journey, Exploded View, Big Map Idea, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Fusion
German violinist Carolin Widmann’s imaginative solo recital spans a thousand years of music history from Hildegard vom Bingen’s antiphon Spiritus sanctus vivificans vita to Three Miniatures by George Benjamin. En route, Widman’s “little encyclopaedia” embraces compositions by Eugène Ysaÿe and George Enescu, pieces that brought new expressive ...
Composer: George Enescu (1881-1955), Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), George Benjamin (b. 1960), Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Instrumental
The Danish String Quartet's Grammy-nominated Prism project, linking Bach fugues, Beethoven quartets and works by later masters, receives its fourth installment. The penultimate volume of the series combines Bach's Fugue in G minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier (in the arrangement by Viennese composer Emanuel Aloys Frster) with Beethoven's String Quartet Op. ...
Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Chamber Music
On his follow-up to Here Be Dragons New York-based saxophonist Oded Tzur and his collaborators apply their subtle dialect in a more intense space, exploring the nuances and colours of the saxophonist’s self-fashioned raga in a suite-like sequence of quiet meditations and powerful exclamations. Throughout Isabela a heightened sense of urgency prevails, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
John Scofield’s first guitar-solo-recording ever gives a résumé of all the influences and idioms he has cultivated over his career in performances on guitar, accompanied by his own rhythmic pulse and chordal backing using a loop machine. Besides jazz, John is known to have always also had a soft spot for the rock and roll and country music he grew up with, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
Hafla is the third album from Norwegian keyboardist-composer-arranger Jon Balke’s Siwan, launched in 2007 as a meeting point for musicians of strikingly different backgrounds and experiences. Siwan celebrates the concept of coexistence and cooperation, making the case for the positive attributes of cultural diversity, as it looks back into history and forwards towards new models for shared work. ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Crossover Jazz
Heinz Holliger’s “dream opera” Lunea which was premiered, to great acclaim, at Opernhaus Zurich, interweaves strands from the life and mind of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch (1802-1850), the Hungarian-born Austrian poet who wrote under the name Nikolaus Lenau. Lenau’s last, fragmentary writings have fired Holliger’s imagination and led to the creation of an intricately inventive work with a ...
Composer: Heinz Holliger (1939-)
Genre: Classical
Subgenre: Vocal
On the album Opening, Tord Gustavsen reveals a fresh angle to his particularly unique trio investigations into Scandinavian folk hymns, gospel, chorale and jazz, as he introduces a different voice on bass. With a new fellow-traveller on board and its recording premiere in Lugano's Auditorio Stelio Molo, the trio discovers inspired new ways to interact with each other, ...
Genre: Jazz
Subgenre: Contemporary Jazz
