JAZZ ON CD: Gwen Ansell
ONLY 27 years old, the ECM label has already acquired adjectival status. Call someone’s playing “a bit ECM-ish” and you’ve summed up that amalgam of north European romanticism, spacey fusion and sizzling free energy which until a decade ago typified the label’s output. In 1984, ECM – the acronym stands for Edition of Contemporary Music – broadened its horizons with the launch of the New Series, focusing on modern European classical music (Gorecki and Arvo Part are in the stable) and early and Baroque period works.
And finally, after too many years of tedious ordering from the specialist shops, the ECM label has arrived in South Africa, courtesy of BMG Africa.
ECM was founded in 1969 in Munich by German producer and musician Manfred Eicher, energised by two core beliefs. The first was that Europe was nursing a new school of jazz and improvised music which the US recording giants were ignoring. The second was that such music merited the kind of quality production values usually reserved for classical albums.
Eicher’s hunches proved sound. The label rapidly acquired a distinguished stable of artists, many of whom were doing distinctly new things with the jazz/improvised genre.
The archetypal ECM artist is saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and his collection Works gives a good sampler of what the music of those early years was like.
A more recent addition to the label is pianist/composer Carla Bley. On Songs with Legs, she teams up with bassist Steve Swallow and the reeds of Andy Sheppard for a series of live cuts from the trio’s 1994 European tour. Bley the composer shows off her Monkish side, with themes that mix the wry and jokey with full-on bebop. Technical virtuosity is supplied by the mournful singing of Swallow’s bass, and by Sheppard in every mood from anarchy to swing.
Fun isn’t in ECM’s original specification, but this album catches precisely the joyous side of three players on the same musical wavelength.
— For more information on ECM call (011) 482-1555