50 Years of ECM — An Exploration of the Label’s Earliest Recordings
ECM 1001 to 1005
(this essay was originally published in November 2019 on my website, www.jonopstad.com)
ECM — A Personal Perspective
This year, the record label ECM celebrates its 50th anniversary. It’s no exaggeration to say that ECM has had a huge impact on my development as a musician. I was nine when I was given my first ECM CD — Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs — but it was in my teens that I began to really delve into the label more extensively, when my brother James and I began to discover recordings such as Ralph Towner’s Solstice, Eberhard Weber’s Yellow Fields, David Darling’s Cello, and many others, which opened a gateway to a body of music that provided me huge inspiration and helped set me on my path to becoming a composer. I began exploring the music in great detail, listening to as many of the albums as I could and eventually building up a large collection on CD and vinyl. The range of releases on the label that have had a great impact on me — on my whole approach to music — is vast.
The half century landmark is particularly significant as ECM is still run by Manfred Eicher, the prolific, visionary producer who founded the label in 1969, and who has produced the majority of recordings released on the label. Unlike some other long running labels that have had fallow patches, changing ownership and artistic direction over time, ECM has had an incredible consistency of quality in its 50 years — in every one of those years multiple albums have been released, amassing to a total now of over 1600 titles. As well as the sheer musical quality the label is also legendary for the quality of aural presentation of its releases — guided by Manfred Eicher’s meticulous attention to detail in the recording and mixing. Although somewhat rejected by Eicher himself, the term ‘ECM sound’ has been widely applied when discussing the aural qualities of the label’s releases.
There is a consistency of aesthetic across ECM releases that applies to the quality of music, quality of recording and the quality of presentation in terms of packaging/sleeve designs, that — for my ears and eyes — no other label can rival. But despite this consistency there is also a huge range to the music of ECM. This range — the variety of genres, musical scenes, musical cultures, ranges of instrumentation, eras of composition explored on the label — is perhaps overlooked by some listeners who might just know the label for its most famous releases — perhaps Jan Garbarek’s Officium, Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert, Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa or Pat Metheny’s run of albums for the label. But the discography is vast and full of profound musical treasures. All in all, it is a record label that I have had a deep and enduring love for since my teenage years.
Filling in the Gaps
While travelling in America recently I had the opportunity to trawl some particularly well stocked vinyl shops (such as the incredible Bop Street Records in Seattle, pictured) and I was able to pick up a number of ECM rarities. One of these was Robin Kenyatta’s Girl From Martinique, one of the very earliest ECM recordings (catalogue number 1008, the 8th ECM release chronologically). This set me thinking about filling in some of the other gaps in my collection of the label’s earliest releases. Over the years I have built up a collection of somewhere in the region of 300–400 ECM titles on CD and vinyl. The period of ECM recordings that I know in the most detail is from around 1974 to 1980, broadly speaking — my collection is fairly comprehensive for these years and I know a lot of these albums very well. In the later years after this there are many masterpieces that I know well, that I have listened to in depth, but also much music for me still to explore and new discoveries to make. Prompted by my recent purchases I went back to check the ECM discography and realised how patchy my collection was for these earliest few years of the label, from its founding in 1969. This is partly as this is the period of the ECM discography with titles that have been out of distribution for the longest. Several from this period have never made it to CD and have been out of print as LPs for decades. In the last few months, as part of the label’s 50th anniversary celebrations, ECM have released many of these recordings online, on streaming and download platforms, for the first time. This is good news to bring this music to new listeners. But I am somebody still very much wedded to physical media in terms of my listening habits. For me there is something about the listening experience of putting on an LP or CD, and the physicality of the packaging, liner details and cover art, that can’t be replicated by listening through Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
So I had the idea to complete my collection of these earliest ECM releases, and to celebrate the label’s 50th anniversary in my own way, by doing a listening exploration of the first 50 titles — to go back to the roots of the label and explore its earliest evolution. A listening voyage through the earliest ECM recordings — in some cases revisiting recordings I know, in other cases making new discoveries. And getting more of a sense of how this great label that has contributed so much to 20th (and 21st) century music evolved in its earliest beginnings.
I decided to put some words down on my discoveries from the label’s first five releases — what follows is some thoughts on hearing these for the first time.
ECM 1001 to ECM 1005: Mal Waldron, Just Music, Paul Bley, Marion Brown, Music Improvisation Company
ECM 1001: Mal Waldron Trio — Free At Last
ECM 1002: Just Music — Just Music
ECM 1003: Paul Bley — Paul Bley with Gary Peacock
ECM 1004: Marion Brown — The Afternoon of a Georgia Faun
ECM 1005: The Music Improvisation Company — The Music Improvisation Company
These five records were all new to me upon setting about this listening journey — the earliest ECM album that I knew well previously was the label’s seventh release, Jan Garbarek’s Afric Pepperbird. Of the five, Free at Last, Paul Bley with Gary Peacock and The Afternoon of a Georgia Faun have been available on CD at some point, while Just Music and The Music Improvisation Company are both considerably more obscure titles (the latter appears to have briefly appeared on CD as an extremely rare limited edition Japanese release at one point). It’s worth noting at this point that it was only in 2017 that ECM made its catalogue available on streaming platforms such as Spotify, and until earlier this year many of the more obscure albums (mostly those that had never been released on CD) remained unavailable in any digital format online.
These five records are fascinating discoveries for me, in particular the three ensemble albums, Just Music, The Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, and The Music Improvisation Company. What is most interesting is the strong relationship with free music at this starting point in the label’s history. Of these five, the three just mentioned are fundamentally ensemble-based free improvisation, while the other two are piano trio records strongly informed by the New Music. As a brief background to the meaning of the New Music at this point in time, this passage from the introduction to Val Wilmer’s brilliant 1977 book As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957–1977 provides useful historical context:
“It was at the turn of the ‘sixties with the appearance of a series of recordings made by Ornette Coleman, an alto saxophonist from Texas, that the music hitherto known as ‘jazz’ began first to be described as ‘free’ music. Coleman, along with pianist Cecil Taylor and the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and, eventually, the drummer Sunny Murray, gave other musicians who were tired of the restrictions placed on their playing by earlier forms the opportunity for greater freedom. The three innovators had different approaches, but basically their message was the same: the player no longer needed to confine himself to a single key, or to use a set pattern of chords as a base for his improvisation, nor did he have to stick to a given time-signature or even, with the absence of a regular pulse, to bar-lines. The New Music, as it began to be known among musicians, opened up new vistas for everyone.”
The title of Waldron’s album, Free At Last, the very first ECM release, is no coincidence in this respect. The release contains a liner note from Waldron (subsequently a relative rarity on ECM albums) in which he writes:
“As you can see and hear, this album marks for me a different approach to my music. It represents my meeting with free jazz. Free jazz for me does not mean complete anarchy or disorganised sound. In my vocabulary, disorganised sound still means noise. And don’t forget that the definition of music is organised sound. Therefore, in this album you will hear me playing rhythmically instead of soloing on chord changes.”
I wonder slightly from this statement how Waldron might have felt about The Music Improvisation Company in this respect. Of the three free ensemble albums it is certainly the most abrasive, and I wonder whether this might have come under Waldron’s definition of ‘disorganised sound’. But for my ears, the three free ensemble albums are the most interesting and compelling of the five releases. They capture a point in time when the freedom opened up in America earlier in the 1960s with the New Music was being pushed in different directions in different parts of the globe, pushing the music to its furthest avant-garde reaches. These three ensemble albums capture free statements from three different scenes geographically in this respect, at this significant era for the music. Just Music is a German ensemble, The Afternoon of a Georgia Faun American and The Music Improvisation Company British. And although the fundamental premise of each is ensemble-based free improvisation, the results are notably different.
Just Music — Just Music (ECM 1002)
Just Music is one of the most obscure items in the ECM catalogue. To the best of my knowledge it has never been released on CD, has been long out of print as an LP, and until very recently wasn’t available online for download/streaming (it has finally been re-released for streaming/download as part of ECM’s summer 2019 batch of digital-only re-releases). As background, Wikipedia has this to say about the ensemble:
“Just Music were a West German avant-garde music ensemble, an interchangeable collective of classically trained instrumentalists founded at the centrum freier cunst, Frankfurt/Main in 1967 by multi-instrumentalist Alfred Harth. An inherent anti-commercial bias kept them at arm’s length from the mainstream music business, enabling them to experiment at will.” [text as shown on Wikipedia, November 2019]
The music is a demanding but compelling listen. The classical background of the musicians gives the work a different flavour to free music of more direct jazz lineage and the music feels like a melting pot of influences bridging the divide between what might be termed “jazz” and what might be termed “classical”. Of the three ensemble albums being discussed it is to my ears the one that leans closest to the expressionist and avant-garde reaches of early- to mid-20th-century classical music, whether European (Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Boulez) or American (Cage), and perhaps the furthest of the three (while still maintaining a strong thread) from the ‘jazz’ side of the scales of works such as Coltrane’s Ascension. The musicianship is superb, and the flexibility of the seven-piece ensemble is impressive, often giving the impression of a larger group, particularly through the range of contrasting colours achieved in the music through the players switching instruments and the use of their voices. Around two thirds of the way through Side 1 (the album is divided into two long pieces taking up a side of the LP each) a passage for two dissonantly intertwining clarinets gives way to the contrasting textural colour of three string instruments (two cellos and double bass, all playing arco), gradually moving to more jittery movement that — by way of some more pizzicato material on the same instruments — segues to a dialogue between drums and tenor saxophone (implying the influence of Coltrane’s work with Rashied Ali), that then bursts into full-blown group improv. At moments like this it feels like a straight line is being drawn between Schoenberg and Coltrane, connecting the dots of different musicians from different cultures reaching for similar musical goals by different means. I would love to know how, or if, this music was notated. The compositional credits on the LP sleeve are simply credited collectively to ‘Just Music’, implying that the music was collectively improvised, but my guess would be that there was some sort of aleatoric chart, perhaps by Harth, to provide structure for the players. In this sense a connection could possibly be drawn with the indeterminacy principles of John Cage’s music. The way the music moves between different ‘scenes’ (my term), with players switching instruments (e.g. Thomas Cremer switching from clarinet to drums at the moment described above) implies some level of pre-determined organisation in the music. In the end though does the means need to be understood to appreciate the ends? Is it free jazz? Is it avant garde classical music? Who knows? And does it matter?
Another query is Manfred Eicher’s involvement in the album. Unusually for an ECM release he is not credited anywhere on the sleeve. The album carries the credit “Produced by Just Music”, and was recorded at “Nettekoven Studios, Frankfurt” — to the best of my knowledge not a studio used for any other ECM recording. So, was this — the label’s second release — a recording that was brought to the label fully formed, without Manfred Eicher’s involvement as producer? Interestingly, according to the group’s Wikipedia entry, Manfred Eicher actually performed live with the group, on double bass, two years later in 1971.
ECM and Free Improvisation
When I think of pure free improvisation, of the kind associated with players such as Evan Parker, and groups such as The Spontaneous Music Ensemble, I wouldn’t have previously associated this significantly with ECM. Evan Parker himself wasn’t credited as a sole leader on ECM until almost three decades into the label’s history, with his albums with his Electro Acoustic Ensemble, beginning with Toward The Margins in 1996. I had previously considered these recordings to be at the further reaches of the ECM aesthetic — partly attributing this to them being produced by Steve Lake rather than Manfred Eicher. Parker had appeared on Kenny Wheeler’s 1979 ECM recording About 6, but I had previously considered this an outlier in his association with ECM prior to the Electro Acoustic Ensemble — putting this down to Parker’s close musical association with Wheeler. I had overlooked The Music Improvisation Society and hadn’t previously taken on board how early in the label’s history Evan Parker, one of the towering figures of free music, was involved. For me, this focus on free music in the label’s early history puts the label’s subsequent involvement with free improvisation in a different perspective. Many ECM records do contain freely improvised music — on later small group recordings by many artists there are often freely improvised pieces interspersed amongst composed pieces. But in later years this approach often seemed to take on a more lyrical, spacious, ambient quality. The Music Improvisation Society, verging towards the rawer extremes of free music, shows that the further reaches of the movement were present in the earliest history of ECM, and implies to me that this approach became refracted through the prism of ECM, and Manfred Eicher’s work as producer, for free improvisation to impact on later recordings in different ways.
The book Horizons Touched — The Music of ECM contains a fascinating discussion between Steve Lake (a key member of the ECM team since the late 1970s) and Manfred Eicher on the role of free music on ECM, entitled “The Free Matrix: An Interview with Manfred Eicher”. Lake begins by saying:
“From the beginning of ECM’s history, the idea of free playing, free improvising or spontaneous composition is one of the themes that runs through the label. From the start it’s one of the threads”
Having now listened to the first five releases, in particular Just Music, The Afternoon of a Georgia Faun and The Music Improvisation Company, I now have a greater appreciation of the degree to which this is true.
In the interview, Manfred Eicher says:
“When I met with Paul Bley’s music and encountered Cecil Taylor and other musicians of the so-called ‘October Revolution’, it broadened my interest in all sorts of music. And it was also Scott LaFaro who showed me, in his very melodic playing, about freedom in jazz. And his dialogue in that Ornette Coleman recording of Free Jazz, with Charlie Haden — it’s wonderful, the contrast and the symbiosis. Ornette was already a catalyst for this kind of stream: his approach was lyrical no matter how burning and intensively he played. In a way, like Scott LaFaro, who was very sophisticated in his choice of notes and lines, and in his phrasing, and always, above all, melodic.”
This emphasis on melody is significant, and perhaps helps explain why music like that on The Music Improvisation Company — the more intense, fractured, raw end of free improvisation — was an extreme rarely visited on subsequent ECM recordings. Of the three ensemble albums here, to my ears The Afternoon of a Georgia Faun is the one where this sense of melody in the playing comes through the most. This is perhaps reflective of cultural differences between the different free improvisation movements of Britain, Germany and America too.
Marion Brown — Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (ECM 1003)
Like Just Music, Afternoon of a Georgia Faun has a strong connection to 20th century classical music, and it is an interesting companion piece to Just Music in this regard. The album is produced by Manfred Eicher. In some ways this fourth ECM release is the first where Manfred Eicher’s role as producer is unambiguous (on Free At Last he is slightly cryptically credited with “Supervision”, while Manfred Scheffner is credited as producer; the production of Just Music is credited to the ensemble; while Paul Bley with Gary Peacock was a recording sold to ECM that pre-dated the founding of the label. Manfred Scheffner was the owner of Jazz By Post, which provided the early distribution for ECM records, and which evolved into a smaller parallel record label to ECM. He died in September 2019). Afternoon of a Georgia Faun was recorded at Sound Ideas Studio, New York — a studio that ECM would return to — and the recording quality is excellent, with great clarity (although with some subtle distortion on some louder passages). The clarity and sense of space of the recording are notable considering the range of instrumentation and timbres, particularly as all eleven players are credited with performing percussion instruments, which in the hands of other labels/engineers/producers of this period could have led to a muddy audio soup.
My main previous exposure to Marion Brown’s playing was through his role on alto saxophone as part of the heavyweight saxophone section (with Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and John Tchicai) on John Coltrane’s seminal Ascension, a truly landmark album. Ashley Kahn’s book The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records is fascinating on the emergence of the New Music and argues that Impulse was the primary label with a wide reach to bring this music to prominence. I would perhaps contend that Blue Note was equally important in this regard, in releasing free-leaning material that challenged the mainstream, by artists such as Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, Bobby Hutcherson, Grachan Moncur III and Tony Williams. But Impulse was certainly the home of the saxophone disciples of Coltrane who became figureheads for this movement — Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and, slightly later, Gato Barbieri. And also Sam Rivers, who (I believe) is the only artist to have recorded as a leader for all three labels of Blue Note, Impulse and ECM. Impulse was also the label of Marion Brown, both before and after Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. Comparing the recording with Brown’s Impulse releases before and after is revealing in showing what a different aesthetic ECM could bring to a recording artist’s work, even at this early stage in the label’s history.
The CD issue of The Afternoon of a Georgia Faun contains an insightful essay on the music by writer Alan Offstein. This passage paints a picture of Marion Brown the artist at the point of recording Afternoon of a Georgia Faun:
“Brown left America to live and learn in Europe. He was well received and allowed to pursue his art unimpeded by the debilitating pressures of the U.S.A. and simultaneously falling under the influence of Continental avant-gardists. Some European recordings were made but only a few North Americans were able to obtain them.
Everything Marion Brown recorded for ESP and his work with Archie Shepp on Fire Music contributed to his stature. Many listeners were impressed with his pure tone, his restraint, ability to capture a fleeting mood or a passionate urgency with economy and ease. During his absence an increasing number of people turned towards the new music and heroes were made of certain figures whose records sold quite well. Marion Brown, in spite of his qualifications, was not one of them, and his name stayed relatively unknown.”
Brown’s own liner note from the original release gives valuable insight into the genesis of the music of Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, and its ‘free’ credentials:
“The music you’re listening to is a collective experience involving six players, two vocalists, and three assistants. Although I am responsible for initiating the music, I take no credit for the results. Whatever they may be, it goes to the musicians collectively. The people that I chose to assist are not actually musicians, but people who have a sense of rhythm and melody. My idea here is that it is possible for non-musicians to participate in a musical experience without being technically proficient in a theoretical sense”
This use of “assistants” who were “non-musicians” is interesting. Brown’s motivation seems to have been in seeking a purity of musical expression unguided by professional musical training. The famous quote by Pablo Picasso, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”, comes to mind here, in terms of moving away from the constructs of formal study. There’s also perhaps a parallel with the use of non-actors in cinema in certain directors’ work. Ornette Coleman recorded a trio album for Blue Note, The Empty Foxhole, in 1966 with his ten-year-old son Denardo on drums (and Charlie Haden on bass). While he did go on to become a professional drummer, I would argue that the ten-year-old Denardo Coleman was not yet “technically proficient in a theoretical sense”, to use Brown’s phrase, so — beyond the family connection in Coleman’s case — I wonder if there is a link between Coleman’s and Brown’s artistic goals in this sense; in searching for a certain naivety and purity of musical expression perhaps.
Aside from these “assistants”, the musicians joining Brown on the recording are a heavy-duty line-up of masters. The two other saxophonists are Anthony Braxton — a titan of the avant-garde — and Bennie Maupin, a highly versatile multi-reeds player who had proven his straight-ahead credentials on a number of late 60s Blue Note sessions (listen to the absolutely burning Live at the Lighthouse by Lee Morgan for evidence), and who had recently begun pushing musical boundaries in Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band (known as the Herbie Hancock Sextet contemporaneously, but subsequently referred to by the Swahili name that Hancock had adopted for himself, and the name of the group’s first album). Both Maupin and pianist Chick Corea had, almost exactly a year prior to the Afternoon of a Georgia Faun sessions, played key roles in Miles Davis’s seminal Bitches Brew album. Drummer Andrew Cyrille was one of the key drummers of the New Music movement, particularly through his work with Cecil Taylor. Jeanne Lee was a significant vocalist associated with this scene, and the line-up of professionals is completed by Jack Gregg on bass, who was a new name to me.
Unlike Free At Last or Just Music, several of the players on Afternoon of a Georgia Faun made return appearances to ECM. Braxton appeared with Corea on Circle: Paris Concert, and also on Dave Holland’s Conference of the Birds, both in 1972; Maupin returned as leader for his album The Jewel In The Lotus in 1974; Corea had the most fruitful relationship, recording over a dozen albums as leader in subsequent years. Interestingly, after a long absence from the label, Andrew Cyrille released his first album as leader for ECM some 46 years later, in 2016. Marion Brown himself never returned to the label though.
In Paul Tingen’s book Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis 1967–1991, bassist Dave Holland is quoted in discussion of Davis’s Bitches Brew-era recordings, saying:
“When you put together improvised music, you’re dealing with musicians and their approach and style of playing. One of the things I learned from Miles is that you don’t come in with a fixed vision. The vision is there, but it is not finished. The composition a classical composer writes is finished, and all the musicians do is interpret it. Improvised music is different. Part of your palette is the musicians you’re working with, and so with this group it will come out one way, and with that group it will come out another way.”
This emphasis on the individuality of individual players and how the curation of a particular line-up of musicians can impact on the end results is important in appreciating freely improvised music. In the case of Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, the use of “non-musicians” along with highly individual masters is very much part of the curation of the work. I am reminded at this point of a debate that raged on the blog of classical music critic Norman Lebrecht several years ago in 2012. Lebrecht wrote a blog post on the Norwegian improv group Supersilent, questioning the awarding of Arts Council Funds to support their tour, on the basis that the band had stated that they “didn’t rehearse”. The view that Lebrecht appeared to be putting forward was that a group that “didn’t rehearse” was not worthy of either funding or critical appreciation. The result was an onslaught in the comments section, including from significant figures from the improv and jazz scenes, taking issue with this viewpoint. The original post appears to have been removed from Lebrecht’s site — perhaps he had a change of heart about his viewpoint after the literally dozens of comments from esteemed musicians — and the only reference I can find online to it is here. Lebrecht’s blog post appeared to imply a misunderstanding of free music, in implying that a musical performance of artistic merit can only be achieved through that performance being heavily rehearsed by the musicians in advance. Yet free music is about spontaneity — a musical interaction between players very much in the moment. The icons of free music are primarily musicians with a total mastery of their instruments (e.g. John Coltrane). Just because a particular group doesn’t rehearse together does not mean that it is not made up of highly trained musicians who are masters of their craft.
This may seem to contradict the use of non-musicians on Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, but the ensemble as a whole is weighted heavily towards highly trained musicians with an impeccable mastery of their craft, and the deliberate use of non-musicians to augment this ensemble by Brown is an interesting choice that is shown to work beautifully in the music.
Like Just Music, the music of Afternoon of a Georgia Faun is divided into two long pieces, taking up one side of the original LP each. There is considerable contrast between the two pieces. The title track, on Side 1, leans heavily towards an avant-garde classical sensibility, while “Djinji’s Corner” on Side 2 is much more closely aligned with the free jazz aesthetic of the New Music of Coltrane, Coleman, etc. The title track opens with sparse pointillistic percussion — wood blocks, rattles, single hits of tom-toms; what sounds like water in a bucket being sloshed. More players enter and the texture becomes denser, but still with a great openness. Gentle whistling enters. Aesthetically this opening feels much closer to the music of the classical concert stage than the New York jazz clubs.
Also interesting in this opening section of the music is the use of acoustical space. The opening wood blocks sound distant and reverberant. At 0’35 the sound suddenly becomes considerably drier and closer. This could be to do with an adjustment in the use of artificial reverb, or (as I suspect might be the case) that microphones closer to the sound source were faded up as new players entered, moving from distant room mics on the opening wood block to a more close-mic’d sound. This may seem inconsequential, but I think it speaks to the use of space as a character in the music. The character of the ‘space’ in which we are perceiving the music changes at this point — which becomes another element of the listener’s overall perception of the music. In this sense I am reminded of something written in the liner notes to Evan Parker’s much later ECM album Boustrophedon (an example of ECM revisiting something of the aesthetic of these early free albums in later years). Steve Lake writes:
“In collaborative music, of course, there are many brushes at work. In recordings of collaborative music even more. This album of Evan Parker’s music takes its sonic direction from the spontaneously responsive live mix of Manfred Eicher and Stefano Amerio — also an in-the-moment improvisation”
I wonder if there might have been something of the seeds of this approach in the mixing of Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. As well as the changes in the sense of acoustic space described there is also use of varying panning at later points in the music that implies to me a sense of Manfred Eicher creating a characterful space for the music. Perhaps not an “in the moment improvisation” in the way Steve Lake described the approach for Boustrophedon, but certainly with great attention to the acoustical context of the music.
At around 4’30, the wood and water sounds give way to more metallic percussion — bells, scraped cymbals, metallic flourishes, ringing resonances. It’s at almost five and a half minutes into the piece that a saxophone enters — the first melodic, non-percussion instrument in the music. This solo saxophone line suddenly emerges from the blanket of textural percussion — a moment of great contrast. Like with Just Music, the music moves between different ‘scenes’ timbrally — at times giving the sense of a larger ensemble as players switch between multiple instruments. By 6’30 the percussion has gone and the group texture is taken over by saxophone and intertwining flutes of varying descriptions. It’s hard to be definite about exactly who is playing what at this point as the three saxophonists are credited with various instruments. All three are credited with different forms of flute (Brown on Zomari, a flute of Kenyan origin; Braxton on conventional flute and Maupin on wooden flute and alto flute), while the opening ‘saxophone’ could potentially be Braxton on the ‘Chinese Musette’, on which he is also credited.
At just after seven minutes there is a sudden contrast in texture again. The winds give way to solo piano. In some ways this is the music at its closest relation to European contemporary classical influences. Corea begins with deeply resonant slow scraping of the low strings inside the piano, before moving to conventional playing, but with an atonal language that seems to owe much to the European expressionists — Schoenberg, Berg and Webern perhaps. Corea’s playing at this point is masterful (and also a far cry stylistically from his electrified fusion-god playing with Return to Forever just a few years later).
At 9’10 there is another change of scene musically as voices enter. The voices are almost operatic in style at this point, tying the music even more vividly to European classical traditions. Flutes join the voices and piano and the overall texture intensifies with greater density of melodic movement and rhythmic flourishes. We are certainly much more closely into the territory of the avant-garde concert stage at this point and further from the New York jazz club. Around 12’30 the music builds to something of a climax and then drops suddenly before the voices take over alone with more staccato phrasing. The experimental vocal techniques here have something of the sense of territory that Meredith Monk would explore on ECM from around ten years later. From here we move to a duet passage between Corea on piano and what sounds most likely to be Maupin on alto flute. This remains firmly in the same atonal aesthetic and again the musicianship between the players is masterful. From around 14’30 we suddenly shift back to the percussion textures of the opening, bringing the music full circle and taking us out to the end at seventeen minutes.
The references that I have made to parallels with classical music, while to my ears valid, could be potentially contentious in the context of the musical roots of the players, as this passage in Val Wilmer’s excellent As Serious As Your Life highlights, in reference to the music of trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith:
“The music Leo Smith plays bears little resemblance to anything Louis Armstrong played — or Don Cherry, for that matter. The AACM musicians have been seen by some observers to have more in common with the aspect of ‘chance’ in music proposed by John Cage. Leo Smith rejects this comparison. ‘We have,’ he says, ‘developed out of the areas of our ancient, and immediate, past’
The AACM musicians have always been disturbed by this comparison, which they view as stemming from the continuing white need to point out white precedents for all Black musical activity”
While this passage makes particular reference to the music of AACM (the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a significant force in the New Music from the mid-1960s), it could equally be applicable to Marion Brown’s work.
I find it hard to believe Brown’s assertion in the liner notes to Afternoon of a Georgia Faun that he can “take no credit for the results”. As with Just Music, the movement between different musical colours, with players switching instruments and smaller cells of the ensemble performing at different times gives me a sense of some degree of predetermination in the structuring of the piece. Again, I wonder if there might have been some sort of aleatoric chart for the players, or perhaps just spoken directions. The album credit reads “Compositions by Marion Brown”.
The second side of the album is a contrast to the first — falling more within the parameters of freely improvised jazz ensemble music. The instrumentation feels more like a ‘jazz’ ensemble here too. Cyrille is given more space to be a ‘drummer’, and the roles of the other instruments — the saxophones, the bass — feel more aligned to jazz traditions. The music is considerably denser and more urgent.
The Music Improvisation Company — The Music Improvisation Company (ECM 1005)
The Music Improvisation Company has quite a different character to either Afternoon of a Georgia Faun or Just Music. It’s a valuable early document of the British free scene — Evan Parker was just 26 at the time of this recording. The music is more intense than either of the other free ensemble releases and is also recorded with a considerably drier acoustic — quite uncharacteristic for later ECM releases. The recording was made at ‘Merstham Studios’ in London, which I can find no other reference to anywhere online, and engineered by Jenny Thor, who I can also find no other reference to. The dryness/closeness of the recording gives much of the music a sense of bursting forth from the speakers. Scurries of sound with searing intensity. The majority of the album is a quartet of Derek Bailey on electric guitar, Evan Parker on soprano saxophone, Hugh Davies on live electronics and Jamie Muir on drums and percussion. The timbres of the four players meld in such a way that it’s frequently difficult to determine which of the four musicians particular tones are emerging from. This is even the case on the two tracks where vocalist Christine Jeffrey joins the ensemble. On ‘Tuck’ the roles of the instruments feel more clearly delineated, with the interaction between Parker and Muir in particular feeling more aligned with my experience of hearing, say, Parker with Paul Lytton perform live at The Vortex. But overall the ambiguity of texture gives the recording a visceral and individual group sound.
Bailey and Parker are of course two titans of the British free scene, but Davies, Muir and Jeffrey were new names to me. It’s intriguing to see a performer credited with ‘live electronics’ as early as 1970. Electronic devices for processing music in this period would have been primitive compared to the laptops and effects processors available to artists today, so Davies’s work on this recording must be seen as somewhat boundary pushing in this regard. It would be many years before another ECM recording would carry a ‘live electronics’ credit. As an illustration of the state of electronics for music processing at this point in time an interesting reference point is an interview with Peter Zinovieff, founder of influential British synthesiser manufacturer EMS, printed in Issue 56 (2019) of Electronic Sound magazine:
“At that time,” [the 1960s, so just a few years prior to The Music Improvisation Company] “there was a whole street in Soho called Lisle Street where every single shop, more or less, was selling off ex-Army or ex-RAF equipment. So you had these great big secondhand sine wave oscillators and filters, great manual ones. And they didn’t cost very much.”
I’m not suggesting that Hugh Davies will have sourced his equipment from the same sources, but I think this quote is illustrative of the experimental approach that would have been required to create electronic instruments in this period, and Hugh Davies’s equipment would likely have been largely homemade, or at least heavily customised. Davies was personal assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen for two years in the 1960s, further cementing the link between this music and the classical avant garde. Derek Bailey has written the following (in his book Improvisation, Its Nature and Practice in Music) on Davies’s role within the group:
“The live electronics served to extend the music both forwards and backwards… Davies helped to loosen what had been, until his arrival, a perhaps too rarified approach”
Muir often plays with an intensity and density that recalls John Coltrane’s description of drummer Rashied Ali as a ‘multidirectional player’. His playing on conventional kit on this recording certainly recalls Ali’s approach with Coltrane. His kit is augmented with metallic percussion, bringing to mind another highly expressive British free drummer/percussionist, Tony Oxley. A look at Wikipedia tells me that Muir became a key early member of the prog rock band King Crimson, before eventually withdrawing from the music business to become a painter.
The relationship between painting and this music is worthy of some thought. Alfred Harth — founder of the Just Music ensemble — had close ties to the experimental art scene. His own website gives an extensive list of his exhibitions and art studies. Going back to the discussion between Steve Lake and Manfred Eicher in “The Free Matrix”, referenced above, this passage is particularly enlightening in this regard:
Steve Lake: “The time-frame of a record can be a canvas on which something can be painted. While some free music sets out to create form by improvised means, other variants are much more concerned with process than structure”
Manfred Eicher: “Well, to use that analogy, on ECM you could find Jackson Pollock and Rothko at the same time. You could have Cy Twombly — to whose work I felt particularly close in the 1960s — and Tapies, and Yves Klein and Fautrier. The whole thing is actually a net that has no frame — a canvas without an edge — the music is open ad infinitum”
The same interview also gives some insight into how The Music Improvisation Company came to be recorded for ECM, as Manfred Eicher describes:
“It was Fred” [Braceful, an American drummer living in Germany who Manfred Eicher befriended and who would appear on ECM’s sixth release, Output by Wolfgang Dauner] “who introduced me also to the Music Improvisation Company: ‘There’s a band playing in Berlin you must hear.’ This was towards the end of the 1960s and that was how I came into contact with the band with Evan Parker and Derek Bailey which was introduced on a record in our early days at ECM. That was a very, very inspired musical unit and at that time I was also still playing myself and trying to play free music. And so I did some concerts with Marion Brown and Leo Smith.”
The connection with Marion Brown through performing — and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, who would record for ECM later as a leader, and also return to the label much more recently with pianist Vijay Iyer — is an interesting insight into how this strong connection with free music in the early years of the label came about. Amazingly there is audio of one of these encounters on YouTube currently (here). The lineup is completed by Braceful on percussion, and Thomas Stoewsand on cello and flutes, who was a member of the Just Music ensemble, drawing further connections between these different recordings.
The aesthetic conflict between free improvisation (spontaneous, of the moment, fleeting) and recording (planned, permanent) is something that has been debated among purists. For context of this debate I have pictured a page from Derek Bailey’s Improvisation, Its Nature and Practice in Music on this discussion. While I understand the points raised here, the simple fact is that I wasn’t alive when The Music Improvisation Company was recorded, or when the group were an active musical unit. Without this music having been recorded I would never have been able to hear it, absorb it, appreciate it, learn from it. So, from my perspective the recording of these free ensembles is invaluable in documenting a moment in the history of the music.
Paul Bley — Paul Bley With Gary Peacock (ECM 1003)
I have made little reference to the two piano trio records so far. This is no reflection on their musical quality, merely that the three ensemble recordings were the ones that intrigued me most of the five releases and shifted my perceptions of early ECM. Paul Bley is of course a pianist of huge significance in jazz, and also very important to early ECM, as Manfred Eicher describes in the “Free Matrix” interview:
“I heard Paul Bley with his crystal-clear touch. No matter how free he was playing, whether it was on the Blood album or Barrage, when Paul came into action, the music suddenly got a new nuance, flavour, sound and approach, and I always found myself in the middle of the music because his tone, no matter on which piano he played, had its special electricity, a quality that Bill Evans of course also had, and which Glenn Gould had, a quality Chick Corea has and which, later, Keith Jarrett developed. But I could always recognize Paul among all the piano players — his sense of timing and the way he accompanies and plays with soloists. He was an inspired catalyst whatever the context. He was a musical idol for me then.”
Paul Bley with Gary Peacock is a trio album with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian — both players who would have enduring relationships as both leaders and sideman with ECM for decades to come. Motian is replaced by Billy Elgart on three tracks. It is an important document of the trio, with some wonderful interaction between the players and music that both swings hard and opens up free avenues, but to me it is slightly less of an ‘ECM’ album than the other recordings of these five. The music was recorded without Manfred Eicher, prior to the formation of ECM. In the book ECM: A Cultural Archaeology, Manfred Eicher is captured in conversation describing the background:
“I already had the Paul Bley tape with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, a tape that was unreleased and not very well recorded. I liked the music, but not the sound. So I went into Tonstudio Bauer in Stuttgart for some remixes and sequences on this tape with Kurt Rapp, the engineer at that time, and edited it. Paul agreed with this work and liked it. And this record got very good reviews, including one by Richard Williams, the journalist for Melody Maker, who was raving about this recording. And I was glad and surprised that my little retouching of the tape made such an impact. And then came the Garbarek album Afric Pepperbird, and suddenly many people were talking about the sound of ECM recordings. It was not my primary intention to evoke a very special sound; what we wanted to introduce was a new type of music. And so the music got a spin and travelled and reached a lot of people, and we got some great feedback.”
Manfred Eicher’s comment here that it wasn’t his primary intention to evoke a special sound perhaps sheds some light on the contrasting acoustical properties between some of these early recordings — particularly for example between the spaciousness of Afternoon of a Georgia Faun and dry closeness of Music Improvisation Company. Meticulous attention to audio quality and sense of space in the recordings quickly became a key factor in the label’s releases.
Despite Manfred Eicher’s work in cleaning up the presentation of recording for Paul Bley With Gary Peacock, for my ears the recording still betrays the relatively poor quality of its origins when compared with other ECM recordings of this era (compared for example with Free At Last, which has a cleaner sound and a better tuned piano). For many listeners this will do little to detract from the quality of the music, but it is notable in the context of how the ‘sound’ of ECM recordings evolved. For my taste, Bley’s best work for ECM came two years later, with his beautiful solo piano recording Open: To Love, produced by Manfred Eicher and recorded at the Tonstudio Bauer. Paul Bley With Gary Peacock is nonetheless a notable recording in the early ECM catalogue, and indeed pianist Ethan Iverson picked the track “Long Ago And Far Away” from the album in his ‘Artists Choice’ selection of 50 tracks to listen to from ECM for the streaming platform Tidal (here).
The recording quality of early ECM albums is also touched on by Steve Lake in the same discussion printed in ECM: A Cultural Archeology, talking about his time before joining the label:
“I would buy all the albums by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, on selected French labels, for instance, and compare them very carefully with the sound of Marion Brown’s Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (1970) or other early ECM albums. I was definitely aware of some larger spatial context for the music, which seemed to have something to do with a different way of hearing. And over time, it became obvious that this was something that this label was doing in a really different way from anyone else.”
Mal Waldron Trio — Free at Last (ECM 1001)
Despite its title Mal Waldron’s Free At Last is arguably the furthest from a free improvisation aesthetic of the five releases. While the opening track, ‘Rat Now’ dispenses with chord changes, the music remains somewhat within modal parameters, with a composed head and with, predominantly, a defined, regular tempo/pulse. I confess to not knowing a great deal of Waldron’s work, despite his distinguished CV with many greats such as Charles Mingus, Jackie McLean, Max Roach, John Coltrane and a period as accompanist to Billie Holiday. Like a significant number of American jazz musicians of the period, Waldron had moved from America to Europe in the mid 1960s. He settled in Munich in 1967 — serendipitous timing for the founding of ECM in the city. The drummer on the recording, Clarence Becton, was also similarly an American ex pat in Munich, while bassist Isla Eckinger was Swiss. Both players were new to me on listening to the recording, although I realised later that I had previously heard Becton’s playing on the self-titled debut of saxophonist Hadley Caliman from the same period.
Free At Last was recorded at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg, a studio that would remain a staple of ECM recordings into the early 1980s. Throughout this period Tonstudio Bauer became one of the two most commonly used studios for ECM recordings, along with the progression of Oslo-based studios under engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug, first introduced from ECM 1007, Afric Pepperbird (Bendiksen Studio, Talent Studio and later Rainbow Studio). My own first ever professional recording studio experience was actually with Jan Erik Kongshaug at Rainbow Studio. When I made my first self-recorded album, Still Picture, as a student in 2004, my admiration of ECM led me to book studio time with Jan Erik to mix the recording. I was sad to hear of Jan Erik’s death in November 2019. He was a hugely talented engineer and a crucial figure in ECM’s history.
Guitarist John Abercrombie, interviewed by John Kelman for the liner notes of his ECM box set release The First Quartet draws an interesting comparison between the two studios (referring to his own recordings at each):
“The Ludwigsburg studio was a bigger room with a lot of reverberation built into it. Even though they were good, I always felt that albums recorded there had a rawer, harder quality than the Oslo recordings. The Oslo albums sounded more refined.”
Waldron made something of a habit of recording debut releases for new labels around this time. After Free At Last for ECM in 1970, he recorded The Call in 1971, for ECM subsidiary label JAPO (Jazz by Post) — also produced by Manfred Eicher — and then in 1972 Black Glory, the debut release of another European jazz label, Enja. While looking into Waldron’s discography from this period I came across what must win the prize for the most obscure ECM album, the provocatively-titled Spanish Bitch from 1970 — so obscure that it has no ECM catalogue number, isn’t mentioned in any ECM discography that I have seen, and only appears to have been released on LP in Japan (that LP now goes for crazy money on the collectors market).
The ECM subsidiary label JAPO (Jazz By Post) just mentioned ran from 1971 until 1985. There was considerable crossover in artists between the labels and a number of the JAPO releases later transferred to ECM proper. Many of the releases remained more obscure though, with perhaps most never making it to CD, although many of these have recently been released online for download/streaming in the latest 50th anniversary batch of digital releases. Jazz By Post was actually a mail order jazz service in Munich prior to becoming a label, and provided the initial distribution for ECM records, as described here by Manfred Eicher:
“We had no business plan, but we had the advantage of Mr. Scheffner’s Jazz by Post [JAPO] distribution. This was the mail order service in Munchen-Pasing, founded by Karl Egger and Manfred Scheffner, which was like the Amazon.com of yesterday. We made Free at Last and we sent this record via Jazz by Post.”
Free At Last is a solid jazz trio album, with some fine playing by the three players. Musically it doesn’t break new ground to the degree that many later ECM albums would, but it is nevertheless a strong statement of intent for the label at its very beginnings. Players of extremely high calibre, exquisitely recorded, pushing the music in new directions. While the conception of the music as a whole doesn’t push as far into free territory as the ensemble albums discussed, there remains a sense of these influences. Bassist Eckinger’s extended unaccompanied solo on the opening track “Rat Now” is particularly compelling in this regard.
1969 — A Turning Point
ECM was founded in a truly pivotal year of jazz history, 1969. Miles Davis’s landmark Bitches Brew was recorded that year. Within a few years many of Davis’s sidemen from this period had become the figureheads of the new, highly commercially successful jazz rock/fusion movement. But the years around 1969 to 1973 found many of these artists first pushing their music into more introspective, exploratory, at times challenging territory prior to finding commercial success with a more accessible (and airplay-friendly) approach. Examples of this can be found in Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi period, prior to his massive crossover success with Head Hunters; Wayne Shorter’s trio of late Blue Note albums, Super Nova, Moto Grosso Feio and Odyssey of Iska, before finding great commercial success with Weather Report; and Chick Corea’s exploratory free playing (as heard on Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, and with Circle) before finding similar commercial crossover with his Return to Forever band. I’ve always found this short period of jazz history fascinating — when these leading jazz artists were pushing the boundaries of the music and exploring new territory, exploring the improvisatory freedom of the New Music opened up earlier in the 60s, but also combining elements from the new territory of rock, funk, electricity, avant garde classical and musical influences from different cultures. ECM was founded right at this pivotal moment. Many of the artists associated with the groups and albums just mentioned recorded for ECM at some point. Indeed, the whole rhythm section of Miles Davis’s band of 1969 (known as his ‘third great quintet’) became significant ECM artists — Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette. Chick Corea’s replacement in Miles Davis’s band, Keith Jarrett, became one of the most significant of all ECM artists. Half of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band recorded as leaders for ECM — Bennie Maupin, Julian Priester and Billy Hart. When Chick Corea and Dave Holland left Miles Davis’s band it was to form the avant-garde quartet Circle, with Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul, who recorded for ECM. While Wayne Shorter has never recorded for ECM, a number of his sidemen on those three late Blue Note albums did, either as leaders or sidemen — Miroslav Vitous, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, John McLaughlin, Billy Hart, David Friedman.
Outside of jazz, considerable boundary-pushing was happening in other music too, from The Beatles to Stockhausen. When considering the history of ECM this consideration of when it was founded is significant.
In his essay Great Big Ears: ECM — A Cultural Archaeology — Notes Toward An Exhibition in the book ECM: A Cultural Archaeology, Okwui Enwezor writes:
“Any consideration of the legacy of ECM and of the place of Waldron’s album in that history cannot… be separated from the specific moment when the label emerged as an advocate for and champion of a number of artists who were rethinking the place of improvisation in contemporary music. ECM was founded at the end of a historically pivotal and challenging decade, an era when the explosive issues connected to emancipatory political and cultural logics were not only reshaping modern society, but also transforming the arts.”
Conclusion
Delving into these first five ECM releases has given me a new insight into the point in time when ECM was founded — in particular it’s shed new light for me on the influence of the free movement from earlier in the 60s on these earliest releases, and the grounding this gave for the future development of the label.
For me, the three ensemble albums are the most interesting and progressive of the five releases. There’s no denying that they each contain music that challenges (and which might perhaps surprise fans of ECM through the label’s later releases). But to me this music is ultimately highly rewarding. They evoke a period in time when the avant-garde in the notated (classical?) and improvised (jazz?) worlds were reaching for similar goals through different means, and in works such as these were reaching a nexus point. If I was to pick one standout album of the five then for me it would be Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, primarily for the title track which I feel is a beautiful synergy in this respect, featuring some exceptional musicianship in a space that somehow feels very ‘ECM’ at this early stage of the label’s development.
Alan Offstein’s liner essay printed in Afternoon of a Georgia Faun is interesting on the difficulties of classifying this music, and the challenges it poses to listeners:
“Modern music is Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, and there is no getting away from this fact; an effort to understand it is, in essence, the struggle to depart from the comfort of familiar surroundings, the intellectual work of devising a new esthetic or sense of order, and involvement. It means embracing the truth that Black music is no longer jazz but more than that […] It is no more possible to conceive any terminal form of what has been called jazz and is now just music [my emphasis] than it is to imagine a highest number”
I was struck by this inadvertent reference to ‘just music’, and the parallel this ultimately draws with ECM 1002. Musical classification by genre is always going to be ultimately problematic at the peripheries, extremes and meeting points. In the end, when we break the walls down everything is just music and I think that ECM has helped illustrate this to significant effect.