Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM [Hardcover] Review

It has been 35 years since Manfred Eicher's brilliant ECM label released Gary Burton's and Chick Corea's wonderful collaboration Crystal Silence.It is 38 years since the label was first launched..

Since then, ECM has created and released so vast and extraordinary a collection of music - path breaking improvisational music, often jazz that does not swing -- that adventurous jazz lovers have come to know the "ECM sound."Over its lifetime so far, it has released the work of a huge range of artists, including these extraordinary albums: Oregon,Dave Holland's Prime Directive, Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert, John Abercrombie's Timeless, Kenny Wheeler's Angel Song, Trygve Seim's Different Rivers, Ralph Towner's and Gary Burton's Matchbook, and Art Lande & Mark Isham's Rubisa Patrol.

When the Portland Jazz Festival honored the anniversary of Crystal Silence's release in February, 2007, listeners, critics and ECM representatives spent hours in lively seminars seeking words to define this ECM Sound.For me, that sound is usually abstract, pristinely clear and spare in production, often with the disciplined ambiance of chamber music, and always original.ECM is deservedly an award winning label.The Jazz Journalists Association has voted ECM the 2007 "Record Label of the Year" in its 11th Annual Jazz Awards.The Association is an international group comprised of more than 450 writers, editors, photographers, broadcasters, filmmakers, educators and other media professionals.ECM Records was also voted "Label of the Year 2007" at the MIDEM Classical Awards in Cannes.As unique and compelling as the ECM Sound is, its cover art is equally identifiable and moving.

In Horizons Touched, Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths have collected many of these images, illuminated by many statements from artists and others associated with the label, as well as those of experts contributing essays to explore aspects of the label's wide-ranging catalog. Together with shorter contributions from more than 100 musicians, 20 essays and interviews explore the ECM ethos, be it in European or American jazz, folk, experimental fare or moving fusions of genres.Design, sound engineering, film and photography and other non-musical aspects of ECMare also explored. Some pieces are analytical or historical, others are anecdotal, philosophical, or jazzily idiosyncratic.Cover and other images are sprinkled generously throughout.

The book is stunning and enriching, and will be welcomed by fans and newbies alike.It is pricey, but handsome; for anyone interested, it lives up to its cost.

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Product Description:

In 1969 producer Manfred Eicher founded a new record label, Edition of Contemporary Music, in Munich. More than 1,000 albums later, after many landmark recordings and new discoveries-including Keith Jarrett's best-selling "Koln Concert," Jan Garbarek's saxophone improvisations, and Estonian composer Arvo Part's profoundly moving minimalism-ECM stands as a model of musical independence unique in the history of the record industry. This portrait of the label traces how ECM set new standards with meticulously realized productions of improvised and notated music, introduced hundreds of musicians to a wider public, and has changed the way music is played, recorded, and perceived. Much more than a conventional label history, this stunningly illustrated tome celebrates and reflects on the ways in which ECM has grown and changed from its origins in jazz to contemporary classical, and from medieval chant to free jazz and traditional folk music from around the world. It includes extensive interviews with Manfred Eicher, more than 20 specially commissioned essays by an international line-up of music journalists and writers, and more than 100 contributions from artists, composers, designers, and engineers who have worked with the label, and whose voices form an oral history in counterpoint.



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FOUR LIVES IN THE BEBOP BUSINESS [Paperback] Review

Spellman, a lucid analyst of the avant garde jazz movement in the '60s (see his liner notes, for example, on the original release of Coltrane's "Ascension"), has contributed with this book four compellingportraits of musicians who gave and have given their lives tojazz.
"Four Lives in the Bebop Business" profiles two altoists,Jackie McLean and Ornette Coleman; and two pianists, Cecil Taylor andHerbie Nichols. Spellman skillfully crafts the narratives, while wiselyallowing his subjects to tell large chunks of their stories in their ownwords.
It becomes clear as one reads the book that it took a lot of gutsto be a jazz musician during the '50s and '60s (and still does). All fourof the musicians faced major obstacles in pursuing their art.
McLean,who enjoyed the greatest amount of commercial success of the four,especially early on, battled drug addiction. Taylor and Coleman faced openhostility because of their challenging, groundbreaking approaches toplaying their instruments. Nichols (the only one of the four who is notstill alive) was just plain ignored, despite his brilliantly originalplaying (check out the two-disk Blue Note compilation of his music), andspent much of his all-too-brief career playing in Greenwich Villagedives.
In spite of bad accommodations, poor pay, public indifference,critical hostility and difficulty finding gigs, these artists, the bookmakes clear, would never play anything other than jazz. In this sense, thebook has an underlying inspirational message. Still, it remains for Americato fully embrace its only true indigenous art form, something which to thisday has not occurred.
The book also offers insights from the musicians onthe creative process and about the historic changes in jazz that occurredduring the '60s, from the perspective of men who were on the front lines ofthe battles between critics, musicians, and the listening public.
Required reading for the serious jazz listener.

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This book offers biographical sketches and quotations from four black musicians: Herbie Nichols, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and Jackie McLean. Photographs.

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