Most record companies measure their success by the number of records sold. But ECM is emphatically not like most record companies. Its founder and director, a reflective German named Manfred Eicher, has the reputation for being an industry maverick, an innovative producer who listens with the ears of a musician rather than a businessman.
The success of ECM as a small independent record label with no corporate deep pockets to subsidize its operation, no pop division to hype sales, stands as direct testimony to Eicher’s artistic vision and integrity. He has given ECM a sound and style all its own, as well as a catalog of more than 600 titles. Market considerations don’t enter into his thinking. Ask him about budgets, sales figures and earnings and he claims ignorance.
“If I thought about how many copies we are going to sell before we make a record, the records wouldn’t be produced,” says Eicher in his German-accented English by telephone from ECM’s Spartan office overlooking the autobahn just outside Munich.
“I record on the basis of my passion for the music. I do not consider what the public would like to hear. I consider what I would like to hear. To me art is about taking risks and asking questions. It’s not necessarily having all the answers, either. It is making a statement that comes deep from within.”
If ECM–short for Editions of Contemporary Music–has made a statement in the 28 years Eicher has been in business, it’s that there is a market for his artistic vision, his intense musical eclecticism.
Jazz and improvised music have anchored the ECM catalog since the label’s inception, with a roster that runs the gamut from post-bop jazz musicians like Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland, Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Egberto Gismonti and avant-gardists like Don Cherry and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
The ECM New Series, a separate line of early music and contemporary classical recordings, includes everything from medieval and Renaissance choral works by Gesualdo, Perotin and Tallis; to contemporary composers like Arvo Part, Gavin Bryars, Steve Reich, John Adams, Gyorgy Kurtag and Meredith Monk; to barrier-defying musicians such as Gidon Kremer, Jan Garbarek, Paul Hillier and Jarrett.
Among the series’ best-selling titles is “Officium,” released in 1994, on which Garbarek weaves his ethereal saxophone improvisations around the Hilliard Ensemble’s performances of Gregorian chant and 16th Century polyphony. The disc has sold more than 700,000 copies to date, which is more than many pop records. Eicher got the idea for the album listening to recordings by Garbarek and the Spanish Renaissance composer Cristobal de Morales as he drove through a landscape of lava fields in Iceland.
“Before we made that recording we didn’t know if it would work, (but) we just took the risk together,” says the 54-year-old entrepreneur, a classically trained former string bass player. “During the sessions I felt this was something very special. I knew it would touch people and it did so in a way I never would have suspected. The juxtaposition of the old and the contemporary seemed to hit the nerve of the time.”
No sooner had ECM taught the record industry that medieval music sells, than EMI Classics began mass-marketing recordings of Gregorian chants as sung by Spanish Dominican monks. That recording, and its sequels, has sold more than 6 million discs around the world. Eicher, however, says he couldn’t care less about making a sequel to “Officium.” He prefers to record sounds that are as yet unheard.
That kind of flouting of marketplace wisdom extends to Eicher’s hands-on approach to running ECM. He produces and supervises most of the label’s recording sessions; in fact, he wields direct control over every aspect of the operation, from choosing artists and recording venues, to operating the mixing board, to selecting cover art.
His reputation as a control freak has drawn criticism from some performers, several of whom have left the label, reportedly citing artistic differences. Eicher denies he imposes his ideas on musicians. “It’s a question of finding a common wavelength on which to work,” he says, pointing to ECM’s five recordings with Part and his recent collaborations with another Eastern European composer, Giya Kancheli.
As a matter of fact, it was Part’s music that launched the ECM New Series in 1983. Eicher happened to hear the then-obscure Estonian composer’s “Tabula Rasa” over the radio during a drive from Stuttgart to Zurich. The music struck him as so pure, so moving, he decided he must record it. One thing led to another, and soon ECM was being talked about as an industry pace-setter that was having a significant impact on new and old music.
The sessions for ECM’s first Part disc, “Tabula Rasa,” brought Kremer and Jarrett together for the first time in a Basel studio. There was no rehearsal: the recording was the rehearsal. Eicher still speaks of those once-in-a-lifetime sessions with awe.
“That first recording we did of Part’s music put me in a very close working and personal relationship with a composer I have come to respect and admire quite a lot,” he says of Part (now living in Vienna), whose fifth and most recent work on ECM, “Litany,” appeared last summer. “I feel we have achieved something that has to do with the nuances, architecture and sculpturing of sound.”
That’s important, because choosing the proper sonic environment for the recordings ECM makes is for Eicher nearly as critical as the music being recorded. Reviewers regularly praise ECM recordings for their clear, transparent, truthful sound. The quality owes partly to the equipment Eicher employs but also relates to the resonant properties of the churches, monasteries and other venues Eicher selects for making ECM’s recordings.
“The best venues allow tones to travel, allow me to create an audible landscape,” says the ECM producer. For that reason he generally avoids traditional recording studios in favor of churches or small concert rooms like the one in Stuttgart, where in 1994 he recorded Mozart piano concertos with Jarrett, conductor Dennis Russell Davies and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. The album was released last September.
With a loan of $4,500, Eicher began ECM in 1969 as a label for jazz and improvised music featuring such musicians as Pat Metheny, Corea, Garbarek and Jarrett, all of whom were little known at the time. ECM’s first release, “Free at Last,” by expatriate American pianist Mal Waldron, had an initial pressing of 500 copies. Six years later, ECM released Jarrett’s “The Koln Concert,” which sold more than 3 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling solo piano recording ever.
Over the next 15 years ECM developed its core audience, primarily young European jazz buffs and collectors who valued the quality of Eicher’s recordings as much as the performances inscribed on them. Although ECM was turning a profit, it wasn’t enough for the restless mind of Eicher. He wanted to do for contemporary classical music what he had done for jazz and improvised music. That’s how the ECM New Series was born. To date, the New Series accounts for about 40 percent of ECM’s releases, jazz and improvised music the rest.
Eicher is loyal to the artists whose work he believes in. When Jarrett first proposed recording Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” Book One, for the New Series, Eicher gave him the go-ahead, even though other producers would have balked. ECM later released Jarrett’s versions of the “WTC,” Book Two, and Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, all major sellers. Their working relationship remains solid. “I respect Keith’s ideas even if I don’t always exactly follow his musical interpretations,” says Eicher.
Meredith Monk, the idiosyncratic avant-garde composer/performer whose newest ECM album, “Volcano Songs,” is to be released later this month, was among the first artists Eicher recorded for the ECM New Series. She says she is deeply grateful to him for standing by her and her music all these years. “He goes for the highest quality and the long run,” Monk has said. “He cares about how a record will sound in 10 years, not how many units he sells in six months.”
Thanks to the advocacy of Eicher and ECM, living composers like Monk, Kancheli, Reich, Kurtag, Heinz Holliger, Sven Erik Tuur and Veljo Tormis have been pushed from cult status into the contemporary mainstream. For that achievement alone, he deserved to win this year’s Grammy Award as recording producer of the year. Although he was nominated, he did not win, an outrageous snub that suggests Eicher is too cutting-edge for the safe, commercial mindset of the Grammy committee.
Still, even the Grammy folks have to sit up and take notice of the fact that, for all Eicher’s love of fairly rigorous contemporary and medieval music and European jazz, ECM has always returned a profit. Almost none of the major European-based classical conglomerates can claim that.
Of course, living frugally helps keep ECM’s bottom line secure. Eicher operates his private company with a staff of only eight, divided between offices in Munich and the New York headquarters of BMG Classics, ECM’s American distributor. He keeps an eagle eye on session costs and limits his releases to three or so titles every six months.
New this month, in addition to “Volcano Songs,” is a third ECM disc of Kancheli works, “Caris Mere,” with Garbarek, clarinetist Eduard Brunner, violist Kim Kashkashian and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra under Davies. Autumn promises a recording of Kurtag four-hand piano works, chamber works by Part and Heinz Holliger, and the soundtrack to French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague.”
Although based in Germany, the ECM boss spends most of his life on the road, shuttling between recording projects in Europe. He spends a great deal of time in Norway, partly because he makes a lot of recordings in Oslo, but mostly because he has always been attracted to the solitude and austerity of the Scandinavian landscape. Despite all the pressures on his time, he is determined to maintain his direct involvement in everything that bears the ECM logo.
“You can only be a truthful, genuine artist if you love what you’re doing and are in direct contact with the music and musicians,” Eicher says. “You cannot just sit at your desk, tell others what to do and hope something will come of it. I am convinced that recordings that are made with care and quality and have a genuine artistic reason for existing can create a dialogue with the listener. And what we need these days, especially in music, is dialogue.”
MUST-HAVES FROM THE ECM CATALOGUE
The ECM New Series catalog is so replete with important new and old music, importantly performed, that no list of highlights can do more than scratch the surface. Here, nonetheless, is a personal list of favorite CDs, presented in hopes that it will encourage listeners to delve further on their own:
Arvo Part: Litany, Psalom, Trisagion. Hilliard Ensemble, Talinn Chamber Orchestra, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Tonu Kaljuste, conductor; ECM 1592. Part: Miserere. Hilliard Ensemble, Orchestra of the Beethovenhalle Bonn, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor; 1430. Part: Passio. Hilliard Ensemble; 1370. Part: Tabula Rasa. 1275.
Gyorgy Kurtag: Hommage a R. Sch.; Schumann: Marchenbilder. Kim Kashkashian, viola; Eduard Brunner, clarinet; Robert Levin, piano; 1508.
Giya Kancheli: Exil. Wladimir Jurowski, conductor; 1535. Kancheli: Vom Winde Beweint (Liturgy for Orchestra and Solo Viola). Kashkashian, viola; Davies, conductor; 1471.
Gidon Kremer, Lockenhaus Edition, volumes 1 and 2, 4 and 5. Works by Shostakovich, Schulhoff, Franck, Janacek, Hindemith, Stravinsky, others; 1304/5, 1347/48.
Perotin, Gesualdo, Tallis and Byrd: sacred works. Paul Hillier, conductor and baritone; 1385, 1422/23, 1341 and 1512.
Officium. Works by Dufay, Morales, Perotin and others; Jan Garbarek, saxophones, with Hilliard Ensemble; 1525.
J.S. Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, volumes 1 and 2. Keith Jarrett, piano; 1362/63 and 1433/34.
Bach: Solo Cello Suites Nos. 1-3. Other chamber works by Carter, Sandor Veress and Heinz Holliger; Thomas Demenga, cello; 1477, 1391, 1340.
Meredith Monk: Atlas, opera in three parts; 1491/92.
Steve Reich: Tehillim. Steve Reich and Musicians; 1215. Reich: Music for 18 Musicians; 1129.
Gavin Bryars: Vita Nova. Hilliard and Bryars ensembles; 1533. Bryars: Three Viennese Dancers. Arditti String Quartet; 1323.
Paul Giger: Chartres. Giger, violin; 1386. Giger: Schattenwelt. Giger, violin; 1487.
