In this final "Jazz Legacies" conversation of the year, Gary Giddins speaks with producer Manfred Eicher about his label's impressive four-decade run at the forefront of jazz.
Manfred Eicher founded ECM Records in 1969, going on to produce standard-setting recordings by artists such as Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, and Pat Metheny. To date, ECM, with Eicher consistently at the helm, has issued over a thousand albums.
Bio
Manfred Eicher
Manfred Eicher (born July 9, 1943 in Lindau, Germany) is a German record producer and the founder of the ECM record label and its subsidiaries.
Eicher studied music at the Academy of Music in Berlin. He is a fan of jazz music and a bass guitar player. In 1969 he founded a new record label in Munich called ECM - Edition of Contemporary Music. Some of the famous artists he has recorded over the last 30 years are Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Gary Burton, Jack DeJohnette, Anouar Brahem, Dave Holland, Pat Metheny, Ralph Towner, Terje Rypdal, Steve Kuhn, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Gary Giddins
Gary Giddins is a jazz critic, author, and director, best known for his longtime work with The Village Voice. Giddins has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, and the Bell Atlantic Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century in 1998. His other books include Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—The Early Years, 1903–1940, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research; Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century; Faces in the Crowd; Natural Selection; and biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He has won an unparalleled six ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting.
Musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. Though its specific origins are not known, the music developed principally as an amalgam in the late-19th- and early 20th-century musical culture of New Orleans. Elements of the blues and ragtime in particular combined to form harmonic and rhythmic structures upon which to improvise. Social functions of music played a role in this convergence: whether for dancing or marching, celebration or ceremony, music was tailored to suit the occasion. Instrumental technique combined Western tonal values with emulation of the human voice. Emerging from the collective routines of New Orleans jazz (seeDixieland), trumpeter Louis Armstrong became the first great soloist in jazz; the music thereafter became primarily a vehicle for profoundly personal expression through improvisation and composition. Elaboration of the role of the soloist in both small and large ensembles occurred during the swing era (c. 1930–45), the music of pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington in particular demonstrating the combination of composed and improvised elements. In the mid-1940s saxophonist Charlie Parker pioneered the technical complexities of bebop as an outgrowth of the refinement of swing: his extremes of tempo and harmonic sophistication challenged both performer and listener. The trumpeter Miles Davis led groups that established the relaxed aesthetic and lyrical phrasing that came to be known as cool jazz in the 1950s, later incorporating modal and electronic elements. Saxophonist John Coltrane's music explored many of the directions jazz would take in the 1960s, including the extension of bebop's chord progressions and experimental free improvisation.
I grew up listening to ECM recordings, mostly everything I could find from Keith Jarrett, then John Abercrombie, Jan Garbarek, Lester Bowie, Art Ensemble of Chicago. I was stunned the first time I listened to this music - real instruments, the clarity, the honesty. In world of over produced electronic "imitation music," the art Mr. Eicher offers the world has enhanced my life and made it happier.
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