Ecm

Ketil Bjornstad - A Passion for John Donne (2014) {ECM 2394}
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© 2014 ECM Records | ECM 2394
Classical / Classical Crossover / Jazz / Modern Creative

Ketil Bjørnstad’s passion for the English metaphysical poet John Donne (1572-1631) is a lifelong affair. His settings of Donne’s verse have led to recordings including The Shadow, Grace and the ECM album The Light. “After working with the texts of John Donne for more than twenty years, I still find new approaches to understanding what he wrote and I find music throughout. It is in the language, in the rhythm, in the silence between the sentences - a passionate quest for meaning and reconciliation. Donne's dramatic life is reflected in the texts and everywhere in them you will find the passion, melodies and sounds”.

Stefano Battaglia Trio - In The Morning - Music of Alec Wilder (2015) {ECM 2429}
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© 2015 ECM Records | ECM 2429 | 4738673
Jazz / Post Bop / Modern Jazz / Modern Creative / Piano Trio

On his sixth album for ECM the Italian pianist and his trio reflect on the work of American composer Alec Wilder (1907 – 1980). “I first came into a more direct contact with Alec Wilder’s music in the early 90s, when I was performing his Sonata for Oboe and Piano and his Sonata for Horn and Piano”, Battaglia remembers. “I had already known some of his popular songs like ‘While We’re Young’, Blackberry Winter’ and ‘Moon and Sand’ through the intense versions Keith Jarrett has recorded. But after working on Wilder’s chamber music I wanted to develop a deeper connection with his intriguing musical universe, and I've discovered an immense hidden treasure.”

Wolfgang Rihm - Et Lux - Huelgas Ensemble, Minguet Quartett, Paul Van Nevel (2015) {ECM New Series 2404}
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© 2015 ECM Records | ECM New Series 2404
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Choral / Chamber Music / Strings

From a composer whose vast output plunders the stylistic gamut of western musical history and then some, here is a single movement requiem full of clean lines and troubled introspection. Et Lux is a 2009 composition for voices and string quartet in which Rihm dwells on certain phrases of the Latin death mass – particularly the notion of eternal light, which he calls “comforting yet deeply disturbing”. The same could be said of Et Lux as a whole. Tropes waft in from across the ages: this music treads the line of tangibility, with sudden rushes of anger or fondness and the messy half-memories that come with grief. The strings complete phrases that the singers can’t seem to summon. Conductor Paul van Nevel doubles the vocal parts to create broad, generous textures that sound lovely and lush against the strings’ icy clarity – all qualities that ECM’s engineers are expert at capturing.

Polish composer and trumpeter Tomasz Stanko's career has been long and varied – from working with the legendary Krzysztof Komeda in the 1950s and '60s, to his own work that ranges form hard bop to electronic improvisation. A wonderful illustration of that principle is his association with Manfred Eicher's ECM label. This volume, in the excellent Rarum series, begins with Stanko's first date as a leader for ECM in 1975 on the album Balladyna. There are two selections from the set highlighting what was well-known at the time as his radical "predatory lyricism" method of composition and soloing.

Wolfgang Muthspiel - Rising Grace (2016) {ECM 2515}
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© 2016 ECM Records | ECM 2515
Jazz / Modern Creative / Modern Jazz / Guitar

Wolfgang Muthspiel – whom The New Yorker has called “a shining light” among today’s jazz guitarists – made his ECM leader debut in 2014 with the trio disc Driftwood, featuring him alongside two longtime colleagues, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Brian Blade. For his follow-up – Rising Grace – the Austrian guitarist has convened a very special quintet, adding jazz luminary Brad Mehldau on piano and the outstanding young trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire to the subtly virtuosic Grenadier/Blade rhythm section.

Morton Feldman, Erik Satie, John Cage - Rothko Chapel (2015) {ECM New Series 2378}
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© 2015 ECM Records | ECM New Series 2378
Classical / Avant-Garde / Chamber Music

This is a marvelous release, equally perfect in conception, execution, and engineering. The program locates the intellectual origins of the American avant-garde composers Morton Feldman and John Cage not in postwar European developments, but in the music of Erik Satie, who with each decade seems a more pioneering figure. Feldman and Cage here seem not modernists, but postmodernists. Front and center at the beginning is Feldman's masterpiece Rothko Chapel (1967), a chamber-ensemble-and-chorus evocation of the Houston, Texas, chapel adorned with paintings by, and partly designed by, the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko.

A welcome return to the ECM catalog for three of the most striking of the early recordings which Jan Garbarek made for the label in the 1970s. In different but related ways Sart (1971), Witchi-Tai-To (1973) and Dansere (1975) brought freshly intelligent and invigorating perspective to bear on questions of dynamics, group sound, interaction and swing, the relation of improvisation and abstraction to the roots of jazz, and the relevance of archetypal yet freshly inflected folk forms to contemporary music. Two ensembles are heard here – Garbarek/Stenson/Rypdal/Andersen/Christensen on the exploratory Sart, and the spirited Jan Garbarek-Bobo Stenson Quartet, one of the most exciting groups of the era.

Norwegian Hardanger fiddle specialist Nils Okland has a broad range of musical interests, as illustrated by his eclectic discography. His solo album Monograph (ECM, 2011) spotlighted his lyrical, folkloric side; Lysøen—Hommage à Ole Bull (ECM, 2011) with keyboardist Sigbjorn Apeland payed tribute to the Norwegian classical tradition; Lumen Drones (ECM, 2014) found him making trance music with two rock musicians; and the recent Felt Like Old Folk (Smeraldina-Rima, 2016) collaboration with the Belgian duo Linus was almost completely improvised. He was also a member of Thomas Stronen's "Time is a Blind Guide" band, although he does not appear on the recording.

William Byrd - Motets And Mass For Four Voices (1994) {ECM New Series 1512}
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© 1994 ECM Records | ECM New Series 1512
Classical / Renaissance / Choral

William Byrd (1543-1623) has been called the greatest English composer, an arbiter of the sublime and master of his craft. And while discerning early music listeners have a fair number of recordings to choose from in order to put any stake into this claim, this offering from ECM is as sensitive an introduction as any into all things Byrd.

Frances-Marie Uitti & Paul Griffiths - There Is Still Time (2004) {ECM New Series 1882}
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© 2004 ECM Records | ECM New Serie 1882
Classical / Jazz / Avant-Garde / Sound Art / Spoken Words / Cello

The combination of spoken words and musical improvisations may bring up associations with the Beat poets and some of their free jazz experiments, but that is far from the effect Paul Griffiths and Frances-Marie Uitti achieve in There Is Still Time, their 2004 release in ECM's New Series. These scenes for speaking voice and cello have a bleak existential quality that moves them into a different direction and are perhaps more like the spare monologs of Samuel Beckett than anything else. Griffiths' haltingly paced recitations of his austere, introspective texts is by turns fragile, morose, excited, and agonized – not exactly a theatrical performance, but certainly dramatic in its intensity and haunting in its suggestiveness.