Free at Last

[genie]

Alternates ahoy, Free at Last, catnip for ECM collectors very possibly: https://www.marlbank.net/posts/free-...rnate-takes/71

[Serial_Apologist]

Alternates ahoy, Free at Last, catnip for ECM collectors very possibly: https://www.marlbank.net/posts/free-...rnate-takes/71

Thanks very much for this information, genie - and a big welcome to the "jazz bored!" and the forum as a whole. We greatly look forward to your contributions.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

The Penguin Jazz CD guide 2002 gave the original ECM of this three stars and one in brackets. A near "four", despite reservations about how (relatively) constrained it was. I always think latter Waldron is much better with horns, Lacy, Ford, Rouse etc, but whada I knows.

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

I think Manfred Eicher should be applauded for running a jazz record label for fifty years. It is strange to hear these excerpts from the very first release which seem so untypical of ECM. When I was getting in to jazz as a teenager I used to love looking through the ECM catalogues and seeing all the album covers. The 1000 series are quite intriguing because the label was really more of an avant garde / free jazz label at the time of it's first decade and I feel that it certainly had more of a jazz remit than eventually became the case. I sometimes wonder just how much Manfred Eicher ultimately fell out of love with jazz and why he turned his back on the more robust material. Discovering contemporary jazz in the 1980s, ECM probably opened my ears more than any other label. Those catalogues enticed you to explore the music on the label more and at one point I became quite obsessive about it.

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It is a strange label in my opinion. There has been some great music put out over 50 years on ECM including some that I think have really made a massive contribution to the evolution of jazz. ECM has always prided itself on being "contemporary" but it worthwhile noting that it has been around for nearly 50% of the period since jazz was first recorded. That is an amazing statistic. I feel it lost it's way in the mid 1990s and became a bit too comfortable.

Although I was a massive fan from the mid 80s and in to the mid 90s, for all the excitement that came with discovering how original and fresh the music was, in retrospect I feel it has been massively uneven in the long run. There are some discs which are essential to any jazz collection but there is also a very large proportion of output which is ordinary at best. I don't think it helps that there is a sameness about so much of the discography nor that a lot of the music is a wasteland of New Age twaddle that has little to do with jazz, contemporary music or even art. I think a prime example is someone like Jan Garbarek, a musician capable of reaching incredible heights with Keith Jarrett whilst under his own name has produced a body of work that is about as hard hitting as Enja. When Eicher's ideas work the music has the capability of being sensational whereas when they don't, it sounds flat. I would also have to add that some of the records have not aged particularly well, something you cannot say about the classic 50s and 60s cuts from Blue Note. Artists like Eberhard Weber sound really of their time now with the patches used on the keyboards sounding a bit ropey.

I see that there will be a special JRR dedicated to ECM next week. It will be fascinating to see what tracks get selected although it appears that players like Lester Bowie are in the mix which is very much the kind of stuff I feel represents ECM at it's finest. I will look forward to this. I have not snapped up a new ECM records for years although I still delve in to the back catalogue for musicians like John Abercrombie whose music I love. None of the more contemporary ECM'ers have much appeal due to fact that they all sound so melancholy. ECM once had the edge on contemporary jazz but I am not sure that they are quite so ahead of the game these days. ECM is now in the position of having as much of a "nostalgic" following as Blue Note. It is really weird how both Blue Note and ECM started off by issuing records by musicians who were really atypical of what both labels became renowned for.