ECM Records

Founded in Munich by producer Manfred Eicher in 1969, ECM has recorded more than 1000 albums spanning many idioms. Establishing an early reputation with standard-setting jazz and improvised music albums – by Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and others – ECM began to include contemporary composition in its programme in the late 1970s. In 1984 a sister label, ECM New Series, was launched to introduce the music of Arvo Pärt with the aptly-titled “Tabula rasa”. Other featured composers include György Kurtág, Valentin Silvestrov, Tigran Mansurian, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Heinz Holliger, Giya Kancheli, Meredith Monk, and Heiner Goebbels. ECM's interests extend across the arts, and the label has released complete soundtracks of Jean-Luc Godard's “Nouvelle Vague” and “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” and a DVD of Godard’s short films, as well as Eleni Karaindrou's film music for Theo Angelopoulos. The quality of ECM albums at all levels – from musicianship, production and engineering to cover art – has been widely recognised and the label has collected many awards. Eicher’s label has been hailed, by UK newspaper The Independent, as “the most important imprint in the world for jazz and new music.”

In January, ECM was voted Label of the Year by Europe classical magazines and broadcasters at the MIDEM Classical Awards, and its release schedule in 2007 features a characteristically broad range of music, with improvisers as diverse as Enrico Rava, Jon Balke, Manu Katché and Roscoe Mitchell, and classical interpreters from András Schiff to the Hilliard Ensemble, the Zehetmair Quartet, Kim Kashkashian and Robert Levin, and Kremerata Baltica. Between the genres, Anja Lechner and Dino Saluzzi move beyond the tango on “Ojos Negros”, Stefano Battaglia pays tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Iva Bittová sings Vladmir Godár’s song cycle “Mater”. Once again, the reach of the music renders redundant talk of an all-purpose “ECM sound”. For a sound is one thing, a signature another...

As Eicher said in a 1999 interview, “For us, the decision of which score is to be realized or which musician or group of musicians is to be recorded will be the ‘given’ for the direction of the sound. We have recorded in so many different locations, from monasteries to concert halls to jazz clubs to modern studios and with various engineers, using diverse technology: analog, digital, two-track, multi-track… A lot of factors influence each recording. All that can really be said about ‘ECM sound’ at this point is that the sound that you hear is the sound that we like.”

In April 2007, Granta Books of London published “Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM”. Edited by Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths, the book is the first to address the full scope of the label’s endeavours.

For More information go to: www.ecmrecords.com