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January 31 , 2006
Coming soon on ECM
“Jazz” on ECM has always addressed a wide range of possibilities. And never more so than in the first half of 2006 with releases by old masters, debuts by new names, fresh constellations of players, and sounds from everywhere – from Gambia to Norway, from Tunisia to India, from Switzerland to the USA.
Paul Motian Band: Garden of Eden
Recorded in New York,"Garden of Eden" is the first ECM album by the group previously known as the Paul Motian Electric Bebop Band, the name-change reflecting a modified artistic agenda. Bebop and bebop-influenced tunes remain a significant part of the group’s palette, and there are invigorating performances here of music by Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker but increasingly Motian’s own material is a priority, and it is sensitively illuminated by Paul’s “personal orchestra”, the guitars (three of them now) and saxes group he formed at the beginning of the 1990s.
ECM 1917 Release date: February 3rd.
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Terje Rypdal:Vossabrygg
A live recording from Norway’s Vossa Jazz Festival, the title means “Vossa Brew”, and Terje Rypdal’s extended work celebrates the enduring influence of Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” - with double drums, double keyboards, the trumpet of Palle Mikkelborg and Terje’s inimitably stratospheric Stratocaster. A spirited crew of old friends, augmented by Rypdal’s son Marius on electronics, considers ways in which rock and jazz have interwoven with each other in the years since Miles drew up the blueprint.
ECM 1984 Release date: February 3rd.
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Anouar Brahem: Le Voyage de Sahar
The eagerly-awaited sequel to “Le pas du chat noir” featuring the Tunisian oud master’s trio with piano and accordion. "Le Voyage de Sahar" has a more evolved improvisational component than its predecessor, while keeping the mystery and magic intact. Inside a programme of evocative new compositions by Brahem, the trio also revisits, and reinvents key pieces from “Khomsa” and “Astrakan Cafe”. As London’s Time Out wrote, “It is almost impossible to imagine a lovelier meeting of Arabic and European musics.”
ECM 1915 Release date: February 24th.
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Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin:Stoa
ECM debut for Swiss pianist-composer Nik Bärtsch and his group Ronin. Bärtsch describes the group’s music as ‘Zen funk’ which gives some index of its precision and joyousness. Ronin’s music is built up of interlocking rhythm patterns and iterative ‘modules’, building blocks of diverse compositional parameter. Inside the tightly organized structure there is room for improvisation – “the pieces are spaces to be entered and inhabited” (Bärtsch) – and the music swings powerfully in a unique ‘ritualistic’way.
ECM 1939 Release date: February 24th.
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Ralph Towner: Time Line
Nobody else plays solo guitar like Ralph Towner. His first ECM recording in five years finds the American guitarist delivering another chapter to the body of solo recordings that includes the outstanding discs “Diary”, Solo Concert”, “Ana” and “Anthem”. Recorded in the richly resonant acoustic of the St Gerold monastery, “Time Line” features fourteen new Towner compositions – he is both an outstanding writer/interpreter as well as a gifted improviser - plus the standards “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “My Man’s Gone Now”, both of which have been associated with one of Towner’s formative influences, Bill Evans.
ECM 1968 Release date: March 24th.
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The Source: The Source
A mainstay of the Norwegian jazz underground since 1993, The Source was formed by Øyvind Brække , Per Oddvar Johansen and Trygve Seim while all were students at the Trondheim Conservatory. Its history has embraced a myriad of artistic strategies, styles and concepts, and the group itself has expanded and contracted to meet the music’s needs (their first ECM release was a collaboration with the Cikada String Quartet). This new disc features the three founders, with bassist Mats Eilertsen. The Source's musical directions have been touched by American free jazz – and there are still strong intimations of Albert Ayler to be heard – as well as modern composition and eastern ‘folk’ styles. Most of the pieces here are by trombonist Brække, but Johansen and Seim both contribute material, and the band also plays the hymnic “Liberania” of Edward Vesala, an enduring influence.
ECM 1966 Release date: March 24th.
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Lloyd/Hussain/Harland: Sangam
Charles Lloyd’s first live album for ECM, recorded in California, features his new trio Sangam. It is a very exciting band and the often-breathtaking exchanges between Zakir Hussain’s tabla and Eric Harland’s jazz drums –a rush of purring, jewel precision beats - galvanize Lloyd’s own playing. Ideas are hurled, often gleefully, between the three musicians. Well-known Lloyd tunes such as “Tales of Rumi”, “Little Peace” and “Hymn To The Mother” are interspersed with brand-new constructions invented in the moment, which glow with the freshness of discovery.
ECM 1976 Release date: April 4th.
Speake/ Stenson/Hutton/Motian: Change of Heart
British alto saxophonist Martin Speake makes his ECM debut with his “International Quartet” , a group first brought together through the auspices of the Cheltenham International Jazz Festival in 2000. Speake wrote new music to embrace both Bobo Stenson’s and Paul Motian’s conceptions of jazz, and drummer and pianist played together for the first time in Speake’s band with mutually-inspiring results, which led to an invitation to Motian to join the Stenson Trio for the album “Goodbye”. The Speake group is completed by bassist Mick Hutton (previously heard on ECM discs with Ken Stubbs/Django Bates and Robin Williamson). After two successful UK tours, the quartet traveled to Oslo to record “Change of Heart”.
ECM 1831 Release date: April 4th.
Susanne Abbuehl:Compass
Swiss/Dutch singer Susanne Abbuehl’s ECM debut “April” made her a lot of friends with its intimate chamber music feel, almost whispered vocals and its cross-referencing of poetry and improvisation. “Compass” is equally atmospheric but broader in its range of reference. Abbuehl sets texts by James Joyce and William Carlos Williams to music, looks at folk songs that were close to Luciano Berio’s heart, reinvents the jazz standard “Where Flamingos Fly”, writes her own words to music of Chick Corea and Sun Ra, and much more. Her young group is augmented by veteran French clarinettist Michel Portal on two cuts.
ECM 1906 Release date: April 4th.
DeJohnette/Scofield/Goldings Trio Beyond
A joyful salute from one great drummer to another, as Jack DeJohnette pays tribute to the life, work and memory of Tony Williams, the man he replaced, in 1969, in the Miles Davis group. Repertoire played by the trio of DeJohnette, Scofield and Goldings includes compositions by John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Larry Young and John McLaughlin, as well as Williams himself. These pieces were all stepping stones in Williams’ musical development during his tenure with Miles and afterwards, and the drums-organ-guitar line-up of the band heard here – in a tempestuous live recording from London – echoes that of the seminally important Tony Williams Lifetime.
ECM 1972/73 Release date: June 9th.
Miki N’Doye: Dunya
Miki N’Doye came from Gambia in West Africa to Norway in 1976. He was the first to incorporate Mandingo rhythms and music from his Wolof roots with jazz in Norway, and has been a driving force behind world music directions in Scandinavia for thirty years, collaborating, along the way with Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell, as well as many ‘Nordic’ improvisers. He has had a long association with Jon Balke, co-producer and keyboardist here, and there are overlaps with the personnel of the percussive Batagraf group and Balke’s Magnetic North Orchestra, but it is N’Doye’s music and vivid personality that sets the directions.
ECM 1971 Release date: June 9th.
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