Jazz /
Live @ Nublu
Wrens creates music that is modern and without immediate comparison. This is revolutionary art, both musically and lyrically. Had Miles Davis lived to be 100, continuing on his path of repeatedly changing the direction of jazz, it would be easy to imagine that by 2026 it could have sounded like Wrens, not only because of the heavily affected and brilliant trumpet playing, but because it feels so contradictory to the institutions that breed much of this music today. When asked about the meaning b…
Clocking The Wheel
In June of 2013, a new label for improvised music was born. After years of working with other labels in the “business,” saxophonist and label founder Dave Rempis saw the writing on the wall that many of those outlets for underground music would soon go belly up. With shifting modes of consumption and distribution due to the wave of digital options drowning out traditional music media, it became clear that artists working outside of the mainstream would have to take over their own production and …
Freedom Trail
"A fine musical trio is always more than the sum of its individual parts, and over two decades the grouping of pianist Michel Reis, bassist Marc Demuth and drummer Paul Wiltgen has developed a distinctive character that hasn’t simply yielded a number of fine recordings, but has helped to set Luxembourgish jazz on the international map. Now, working with an orchestra conducted by Vince Mendoza --who also penned some of the arrangements --and with guest saxophonist Joshua Redman, they have deliver…
Lost Mist
The debut album from a free jazz piano trio founded by up-and-coming drummer Masatsugu Hattori, featuring pianist Nana Omori and bassist Masashi Kato, the album includes seven tracks that span free jazz and ambient/electro.
It’s Always About Liberation
Ancient Infinity Orchestra return with their third album, It’s Always About Liberation, a new record that deepens the vision of their acclaimed recent work while moving into darker, more searching emotional territory.
Conceived as a partner to It’s Always About Love, this new body of work shares its predecessor’s generosity and spiritual openness, but carries a different charge. Where the previous album focused on healing and warmth, It’s Always About Liberation is largely animated by struggle, …
Sirenjaw
Sirenjaw documents the first meeting of three musicians who, while previously connected through various collaborations, had not performed together as a trio before this recording. The project brings together long-standing musical relationships: Lukas Koenig and Vinicius Cajado share a deep-rooted connection within the Viennese music scene; Koenig and Kit Downes have collaborated both live and on record; and Downes and Cajado have recently worked together in a range of ensemble contexts in Berlin…
Pat Metheny Group
The self‑titled Pat Metheny Group album is the moment an idea becomes a band. Emerging in the late 1970s, Pat Metheny Group arrive with a sound that feels fully sketched yet still buzzing with first‑chapter urgency. Pat Metheny’s guitar speaks in a clear, ringing voice that draws as much from Midwestern folk and rock radio as from bebop lineage, while the writing leans into expansive song forms rather than head‑solo‑head orthodoxy. The result is a music that sounds like it grew up on wide horizo…
Za Górami
Vocalist and violinist Alice Zawadzki makes her ECM leader debut with Za Górami ("beyond the mountains"), a luminous and deeply personal song-cycle that gathers melodies from across the folk traditions of Central and Eastern Europe, the Sephardic and Yiddish diaspora, Ladino balladry and her own original writing. Sung in a remarkable range of languages, the album feels less like a recital than a series of half-remembered lullabies and incantations, carried on Zawadzki's pure, weightless voice an…
Le pas du chat noir
One of ECM's best-loved albums: oud master Anouar Brahem in a hushed, nocturnal trio with piano and accordion, dissolving Arabic music, European chamber music and jazz into pure melody and space. A modern classic.
Blue Maqams
On Blue Maqams, oud master Anouar Brahem brings his instrument into the very heart of the modern jazz tradition, recording in New York with a band of genuine giants. Bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette and pianist Django Bates meet Brahem's Arabic maqam vocabulary on its own terms, translating its modal subtleties into the elastic swing, deep groove and open interplay of the highest level of jazz. Holland and DeJohnette, who have decades of shared history, provide a foundation that is …
Touch of Time
Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen and pianist Harmen Fraanje in a duo of whispers: fragile melodies, ghostly vocals, electronic shadows and open silence. Ambient, melancholy and deeply atmospheric.
Return To Forever
Chick Corea's luminous 1972 classic that launched a movement, with Stanley Clarke, Airto Moreira, Flora Purim and Joe Farrell. Sunlit Brazilian melody and weightless groove; a founding ECM statement.
In Praise of Dreams
Jan Garbarek crafts a brooding, electronic-tinged song without words, with violist Kim Kashkashian and drummer Manu Katché. Spacious, hypnotic and cinematic; ambient chamber music, unmistakably ECM.
Places
A cornerstone of the early Nordic ECM sound: Jan Garbarek's keening saxophone over shifting, atmospheric backdrops, with John Taylor, Bill Connors and Jack DeJohnette. Glacial, majestic, carved from northern light.
Officium
ECM's landmark cross-over: Jan Garbarek's saxophone improvising around medieval and Renaissance chant sung by The Hilliard Ensemble, recorded in a monastery. Sublime, meditative and utterly unclassifiable.
Swallow Tales
Guitarist John Scofield offers a warm and affectionate tribute to a lifelong friend and mentor on Swallow Tales, an album devoted entirely to the compositions of the great electric bassist Steve Swallow. Joined by Swallow himself and by longtime drummer Bill Stewart, Scofield revisits a songbook he has known intimately for half a century, having first studied with Swallow as a young musician. The trio recorded the whole set in a single relaxed day, and that spontaneity is audible in every track:…
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
On this absorbing recording Keith Jarrett steps away from jazz entirely to interpret the Württemberg Sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, performed on clavichord. Best known for his groundbreaking improvised concerts and his luminous jazz quartets and trios, Jarrett has long maintained a parallel life as a serious interpreter of notated keyboard music, and here he turns to one of the most adventurous composers of the eighteenth century. C.P.E. Bach's writing is famously restless and expressive,…
Facing You
Where it all began: Keith Jarrett's first ECM solo piano album (1971). Spontaneous compositions of startling melodic and rhythmic invention that foreshadow The Köln Concert. A cornerstone of jazz piano.
The Melody At Night, With You
Keith Jarrett's most tender solo album, taped at home during recovery from illness as a gift to his wife. Standards and folk songs played with disarming simplicity. Hushed, fragile and deeply moving.
Last Dance
Intimate duo standards from pianist Keith Jarrett and bassist Charlie Haden, from the Jasmine sessions. Unhurried and conversational, two old friends; a poignant and beautiful farewell.