Lately Listening To... 3 from ECM
May. 30th, 2006 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peteryoungECM stands for 'Editions of Contemporary Music' but, as everyone who knows the label says, might just as well stand for 'Eicher's Collection of Music'. Manfred Eicher, the German founder, is also the producer for most of the recordings. Jazz is hardly the limit to what it has offered over the years, including a long list of classical music both modern and ancient, extraordinary experimentation and a flourishing amount of world styles, and all with high production values that make what is known as 'the ECM Sound'. Eicher has made few mistakes in the 37 year history of ECM, and whatever they release is nearly always magic to someone's ears. I've heard about a third of their entire catalogue (which currently stands at around 900 albums), and this is something I perennially work on as there are always new gems to discover year after year.
Zakir Hussain, Making Music, 1987
Keith Jarrett, Vienna Concert, 1992
Nils Petter Molvær, Khmer, 1997
Zakir Hussain, Making Music, 1987
Zakir Hussain is one of the most respected living practitioners of Indian music, his finesse on the tablas being way beyond even the likes of Talvin Singh. People like to trade stories of how they came upon this album. My own is that I first heard clips of the first long track on David Freeman's mid-afternoon programme on Radio Oxford in which, in between half a dozen literary interviews he would play the most uncommercial and eclectic music (occasionally throwing in a Beach Boys tune or two if the sun was out). I later found a bootleg tape of it in the Middle East and played it to death before years later finding the CD. Hussain is joined by Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, English guitarist John McLaughlin (with whom Hussain played in the group Shakti) and Indian flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, all musicians clever enough not to make the mistake of subverting the highly regarded musical identities of the ensemble for the sake of a homogenised, meandering and meaningless fusion. The personality of each shines through even if you have never encountered them before, and they show a reverential, almost audible respect for each other's talents and spontaneity, which for me is how Making Music rises above other, more deliberately structured East/West musical exchanges. I once met 'Zaki' after a gig in Portland, Oregon, being introduced by a mutual friend. It turned out to be a rare gig in that he never once stopped the music to asked the audience for complete silence. With the first few hearings of Making Music this was an album that commanded undivided attention, after which it quickly began to feel like a comfortable, friendly, familiar coat on a cold, windy day, and still does.
Keith Jarrett, Vienna Concert, 1992
This completely improvised solo piano gig saw Keith Jarrett push himself in a particular direction. I have never heard a musician get as close to their creative source as Jarrett does here: from a long melodic introduction you then hear him going on an abstract journey inward, drawing back before getting burned by the experience and coming out the other side. If he had not already released an album called The Moth and the Flame this would have made the perfect title. Much of his exploration is barely musical in any rhythmic sense but he is never discordant, the strangeness flowing from his ability to patiently communicate something above and beyond mere music. I'd hazard a guess that this must be one of the most important recordings of solo improvisation ever released anywhere, if only because just the act of listening to it can be a most extraordinary experience in itself. One to handle with care.
Nils Petter Molvær, Khmer, 1997
This was a deceptive discovery. The CD's outer sleeve looks fairly standard for ECM – a restrained and tasteful photograph of a broken, erotic Vietnamese sculpture – but slip off the CD's outer sleeve and you get an electrified reversal which somehow undermines preconceptions about the music inside. Clever. As is often the case with ECM, there was a buzz about this album on the European scene months before it was released. Playing it for the first time is a revelation, to the degree that this music's heavy groove goes against the grain of just about everything else on the austere ECM label. It is brave stuff – industrial-strength rock drumming, cathedral-like synths, a multitude of over-the-edge guitars, a pervading and dangerous sense of mood and some haunting horn-playing from Nils Petter Molvær which owes more to the atmospherics of a tripped-out, ambient-era Mark Isham than any canonical jazz heritage. Molvær is still one of Norway's most sought-after musicians, and began explorations for Khmer by working on some fresh material with assorted Scandinavian guitarists plus drummers who also had one bass pedal in the rock world. This was the kind of stuff that ECM might normally sniff at, but producer Manfred Eicher listened to a demo and was impressed enough with the sound but felt it needed more focus. After a sharper reworking Eicher agreed to produce it himself: this was unusual music for a man more famed for producing the likes of Keith Jarrett or The Hilliard Ensemble. It was a risk that paid off and Eicher showed an even great versatility of musical vision, plus the fact that the sharper end of European jazz would have been much poorer without the rich seam of sound that Molvær had uncovered here and has continued to mine ever since. Molvær later worked on DJ remixes which ECM also released as singles, something else the label had never done before. This is very tight and engrossing music that forces you to confront every detail head on, particularly in the almost physical dynamism of 'Tløn' and 'Song of Sand'. It is only vaguely jazz in the sense that it is improvisational, and if people ask me to recommend something different I point them here. Certainly not for everyone, but Khmer never fails to elicit a strong reaction either way.
Zakir Hussain, Making Music, 1987
Keith Jarrett, Vienna Concert, 1992
Nils Petter Molvær, Khmer, 1997
Zakir Hussain, Making Music, 1987
Zakir Hussain is one of the most respected living practitioners of Indian music, his finesse on the tablas being way beyond even the likes of Talvin Singh. People like to trade stories of how they came upon this album. My own is that I first heard clips of the first long track on David Freeman's mid-afternoon programme on Radio Oxford in which, in between half a dozen literary interviews he would play the most uncommercial and eclectic music (occasionally throwing in a Beach Boys tune or two if the sun was out). I later found a bootleg tape of it in the Middle East and played it to death before years later finding the CD. Hussain is joined by Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, English guitarist John McLaughlin (with whom Hussain played in the group Shakti) and Indian flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, all musicians clever enough not to make the mistake of subverting the highly regarded musical identities of the ensemble for the sake of a homogenised, meandering and meaningless fusion. The personality of each shines through even if you have never encountered them before, and they show a reverential, almost audible respect for each other's talents and spontaneity, which for me is how Making Music rises above other, more deliberately structured East/West musical exchanges. I once met 'Zaki' after a gig in Portland, Oregon, being introduced by a mutual friend. It turned out to be a rare gig in that he never once stopped the music to asked the audience for complete silence. With the first few hearings of Making Music this was an album that commanded undivided attention, after which it quickly began to feel like a comfortable, friendly, familiar coat on a cold, windy day, and still does.
Keith Jarrett, Vienna Concert, 1992
This completely improvised solo piano gig saw Keith Jarrett push himself in a particular direction. I have never heard a musician get as close to their creative source as Jarrett does here: from a long melodic introduction you then hear him going on an abstract journey inward, drawing back before getting burned by the experience and coming out the other side. If he had not already released an album called The Moth and the Flame this would have made the perfect title. Much of his exploration is barely musical in any rhythmic sense but he is never discordant, the strangeness flowing from his ability to patiently communicate something above and beyond mere music. I'd hazard a guess that this must be one of the most important recordings of solo improvisation ever released anywhere, if only because just the act of listening to it can be a most extraordinary experience in itself. One to handle with care.
Nils Petter Molvær, Khmer, 1997
This was a deceptive discovery. The CD's outer sleeve looks fairly standard for ECM – a restrained and tasteful photograph of a broken, erotic Vietnamese sculpture – but slip off the CD's outer sleeve and you get an electrified reversal which somehow undermines preconceptions about the music inside. Clever. As is often the case with ECM, there was a buzz about this album on the European scene months before it was released. Playing it for the first time is a revelation, to the degree that this music's heavy groove goes against the grain of just about everything else on the austere ECM label. It is brave stuff – industrial-strength rock drumming, cathedral-like synths, a multitude of over-the-edge guitars, a pervading and dangerous sense of mood and some haunting horn-playing from Nils Petter Molvær which owes more to the atmospherics of a tripped-out, ambient-era Mark Isham than any canonical jazz heritage. Molvær is still one of Norway's most sought-after musicians, and began explorations for Khmer by working on some fresh material with assorted Scandinavian guitarists plus drummers who also had one bass pedal in the rock world. This was the kind of stuff that ECM might normally sniff at, but producer Manfred Eicher listened to a demo and was impressed enough with the sound but felt it needed more focus. After a sharper reworking Eicher agreed to produce it himself: this was unusual music for a man more famed for producing the likes of Keith Jarrett or The Hilliard Ensemble. It was a risk that paid off and Eicher showed an even great versatility of musical vision, plus the fact that the sharper end of European jazz would have been much poorer without the rich seam of sound that Molvær had uncovered here and has continued to mine ever since. Molvær later worked on DJ remixes which ECM also released as singles, something else the label had never done before. This is very tight and engrossing music that forces you to confront every detail head on, particularly in the almost physical dynamism of 'Tløn' and 'Song of Sand'. It is only vaguely jazz in the sense that it is improvisational, and if people ask me to recommend something different I point them here. Certainly not for everyone, but Khmer never fails to elicit a strong reaction either way.
