ROUNDTABLEME

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MANFREd EICHER

okwUI ENwEzoR

STEVE LAkE

kARL LIPPEGAUS

MARkUS MÜLLER

Album cover (detail) The Art Ensemble of Chicago,

Nice Guys (ECM 1126), 1978

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MANFREd EICHER

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If we are going to put forward a theory of contemporary art or a definition of contemporary art in the most basic way we can imagine, it would be to say that contemporary art is first and foremost post-medium, and secondly that it is interdisciplinary, which means that contemporary art has a capacity to absorb and internalize the energies of so many disciplines within its context. A small but important part of this equation is the relationship between contemporary art and sound, or—to be more precise—music. From Fluxus to Happenings in the late 1950s and 1960s, the complex relationship between experimental music and art has generated important creative projects that, to my thinking, intersect with developments in contemporary music. while I was thinking about the very foundation and formulation of ECM in the late 1960s, I thought about another fact: that this was a moment when a lot of transformation was taking place in contemporary art, the redefinition of what the work of art was in the context of Conceptual Art—the emergence in several fronts of a way of working such as repetition and seriality in the context of minimalism; and the critique of the artistic object and commodity form via the lexical and indexical questions of art in relation to Post-Concep-tual practices. These developments, much of which emerged in the 1960s seemed to so neatly intersect in the world of ECM’s practice. So this project, ECM – A Cultural Archaeology, is an attempt not only to examine the unique artistic project of ECM in relation to the work of some of the most experimental musicians to emerge from the avant-garde projects of the 1960s, but also to bring together this series of intersections and maybe to use that as a way to open up a path into the radical breakthrough that ECM realized in its work. So maybe I can begin with a very simple question to Manfred: when you conceived ECM in the late 1960s, it was known as “edition of contemporary music.” why did you use that formulation?

In order to fill in some business forms with the authorities in Munich, we needed a name for the company. I had no idea what this company should be called, and overnight I was thinking about something neutral, bringing together affinities that I had with contemporary art, music, all the new [music], composed and not-composed. And I thought, “Edition of Contemporary Music” could be a term that may last longer than a year or two. After nearly 45 years I still think this is quite a good description. It’s also something that can be varied in many ways, as we did later with ECM New Series and ECM Cinema. Some people have thought that ECM has something to do with my name. It doesn’t.

what is for me very striking is the fact that you had no predetermined plots. You didn’t even have the name until the very last moment. But you must have had a sense of the kind of music you wanted to bring out through this form that you put together. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship between the music that ECM produced and the ideas that you had in your head of what that music should be?

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kARL LIPPEGAUS

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I had affinities and knew musicians that I liked, but I had no concept whatsoever. There was only an idea to record music that I like in a different way, whatever “different“ means, because I had also no skill as a producer or recording engineer. But I listened to a lot of music, for instance, on a label called ESP-disc. It was a label run by Bernard Stollman, an American lawyer, who brought very good musicians into his garage, which also served as his studio. And the music sounded like it was recorded under water. It was wonderful music that he recorded, but not in a way that I would like to really do it myself. And since I was interested as a musician in tone quality, in sound, in the production of tone and sounds and layers, I thought we should do it in a different way. And I knocked at the doors of musicians that I knew from before, like Paul Bley, Robin kenyatta, Jim knapp, Mal waldron, and others, and asked them whether they would record for us. And so, step by step, slowly, but also insistently, we found a rhythm and also built a frame for a musical direction that was not there at that time. There were many labels that had their producers—there was Blue Note, Riverside, there was Verve, there was Impulse—very good labels that made their own things, but I wanted to make it a bit differently as a European and bring in the experience that I had in written music and the knowledge of improvised music and try to bring it together without know-ing how that might develop.

So in a sense your goal was to make a bridge between musicians working else where and European tradition and context at that particular time?

Yes. I invited first American musicians that I knew from before. I had played with them now and then. There was Leo Smith, Marion Brown, Paul Bley, and I invited them to record for us, or I contacted musicians that played with Miles davis, like Chick Corea or keith Jarrett, whom I knew from concerts in Europe. And then, yes, they said, “Let’s try to work with Manfred.” And so they did, and they liked it, and we liked it, too. And so, that’s all about the concept that we had.

I suppose, because this is a free and open discussion in a sense, I really do invite any of you to step in at any time you feel like you want to amplify or discuss or pose questions to Manfred.

I think it’s very interesting that Manfred mentioned ESP, because it was really exciting, what ESP was suddenly doing from 1964 onward. But, as he said, the music was recorded as though it was coming from under water. we didn’t really hear all the detailed sound information that was happening in the studios where they played. Small studios, cheap studios. And so Manfred really developed something much more detailed and much clearer, a much clearer

MARkUS MÜLLER

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sound, a much more transparent sound. It was almost like listening to music in 3d. Today you would call it ”dolby Surround Sound“ or something, when you’re in a really good cinema. Suddenly you hear a small group that sounds like an orchestra, you hear the drums, but you also hear everything else that’s happening, including what Paul Motian is playing. And you just don’t hear a very narrow picture of it, like it was on ESP. I think that was very striking.

And for you this was the idea of a kind of spatial experience of the music . . .

Exploring the space.

. . . which was really a very new thing in terms of the experience of hearing the recorded sound . . .

Absolutely.

what about you, Markus?

Practically speaking, I think that the recordings, especially in the context of ESP and neighboring contexts, I believe also had economic issues, as well as the fact they had to self-learn how to really set up these kinds of recording sessions. . . . Now with ECM, what I found interesting in the very beginning is how important was the Japanese success of that first album Mal waldron did with ECM [Free at Last, 1969]. I mean, was there any idea like a business plan for the first year or the second year, something like that? And the other thing is that I believe, in the very beginning, ECM actually did produce a couple of recordings that were done before. one that comes to mind is Paul Bley and Gary Peacock, which I think was recorded before the foundation of ECM. And then, on the other hand, there is this famous anecdote that Jan Garbarek tells: when you first contacted him, he thought that he might never hear from you again, because it was a little bit like, ”don’t call us, we’ll call you.” I think that’s the phrase he uses. And when you then contacted him, he asked you whether you would be interested in publishing a tape that he had. And you immediately said, no, no, no, I want to do a new recording with you. And that’s, I believe, when you approached [Jan Erik] kongshaug in oslo for the first time. So what’s the difference between the Bley-Peacock album and the Garbarek, the next step in your own recording?

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I met Jan Garbarek in Bologna in a festival in 1968, when he was playing with the George Russell group. I was looking around the theater and heard some interesting sounds coming from the cellar and went there, and there was kind of an Alain delon type of person standing there with a tenor saxophone. He was playing and rehearsing with George Russell. Terje Rypdal was there, Arild Andersen, and Jon Christensen was also in the band, in a large ensemble. And Jan said, “I heard you maybe like to start a record company.” I said, “No, no, not yet.” But he said, “oh, I have a tape, would you like to have it?” This was a recording of his current quartet. I said, “Maybe not. If I do start a record company, I would like to call you and make a recording myself.” And after that, a year passed and then I wrote in my broken English and said, “Jan, I would like to come to oslo and do a recording.” And he said, “Yes, I [will] set up a recording situation.” And it was in the Sonja-Henie-Museum (today the Henie-onstad Center) outside of oslo. Bjørnar Andresen was the engineeer. A very good bass player and probably also a good sound engineer, but not for this session in this reverberant room. In the middle of the night we stopped the session and said, let’s do it somewhere else. And then Arild called Jan Erik kongshaug, a young engineer who just began his work in the studio of Arne Bendixen. we went there the same day. And then we recorded Afric Pepperbird (1970) and it actually came out as an amazing sound pro- duction as well, because we experimented and set up a sound and a music that was unheard of, even for this group. It was really a great experience. And I traveled back to Munich, with five reels of multitrack tapes, feeling very proud.

I already had the Paul Bley tape with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, a tape that was unreleased and not very well recorded. I liked the music, but not the sound. So I went into Tonstudio Bauer in Stuttgart for some remixes and sequences on this tape with kurt Rapp, the engineer at that time, and edited it. Paul agreed with this work and liked it. And this record got very good reviews, including one by Richard williams, the journalist for Melody Maker, who was raving about this recording. And I was glad and suprised that my little retouching of the tape made such an impact. And then came the Garbarek album Afric Pepperbird, and suddenly many people were talking about the sound of ECM recordings. It was not my primary intention to evoke a very special sound; what we wanted to introduce was a new type of music. And so the music got a spin and traveled and reached a lot of people, and we got some great feedback.

we had no business plan, but we had the advantage of Mr. Scheffner’s Jazz by Post [JAPo] distribution. This was the mail order service in München-Pasing, founded by karl Egger and Manfred Scheffner, which was like the Amazon.com of yesterday. we made Free at Last and we sent this record via Jazz by Post. I had contacts from my early days in working as a free-lancer for various publishing companies in Munich. I sent the waldron tape to Mr. Uehara, a Japanese music entrepreneur, who didn’t know much about this type of music, but knew how to persuade people: Listen to that,

ME

Recording Session in oslo for kenny wheeler’s

Deer Wan (ECM 1102), Jan Garbarek and

Manfred Eicher, 1978, Photo: Roberto Masotti

check this out. So some people bought this tape and said, “we pay you an advance, this is good enough?” The offer came from RCA in Japan via telex and I was surprised. I slept on it, and responded, “Fine, but we think we should have 5,000 marks more.” And the people said, “Mhm, so-so.” So Free at Last was free to travel internationally. And from this advance money we could partly finance Chick Corea’s Return to Forever (1972) — without any business plan, things started to go in the right direction.

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STEVE LAkE

So there was no business plan, but there was a structure that already existed, the Jazz by Post was the structure of distribution.

The structure was there and the direction.

Steve, you have a very long relationship with ECM, and with Manfred. But before that relationship, your relationship was as a listener of ECM’s music and a critic of that. Relate some of this to the points made by Manfred, karl, and Markus, in terms of your own experience of the label’s work: did you experience that same kind of spatial quality that karl described when you listened to the recordings?

Yes, I did, and I felt it already, before I was a writer, when I was just a kid buying records. I would buy all the recordings by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, on selected French labels, for instance, and compare them very carefully with the sound of Marion Brown’s Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (1970) or other early ECM albums. I was definitely aware of some larger spatial context for the music, which seemed to have something to do with a different way of hearing. That really struck me straight away. And over time, it became obvious that this was something that this label was doing in a really different way from anyone else. As karl said, there’s a sense of being able to look into the production like looking into clear water, and seeing the movement of the different lines, that was a fresh experience of the music, I think.

what is for me very interesting, Manfred, is that you said that you had no business plan, but surely you knew who you wanted to record. That was a plan. what were the criteria that you established in terms of the musicians you wanted to work with? And how did that go on?

RoUNdTABLE

Still from See the Music (1971)

by Theodor kotulla

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I think it was an empathy for the music itself and for the people that I had in mind. They were the few musicians that really meant a lot to me, and I contacted them without having the money in the background. First there was the contact, there was the talk, and in these talks we shared some affinity for each other, and then I knocked on the doors of various friends and various other people to help me get the thing done. when we finished a recording, we started to think about how we could introduce it. Many people were saying at the end of the ’60s, that jazz is a dead end. But we felt we should address this music in a different way, put it in a different envelope.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the business. I think, we really need to focus on the artistic.

I actually would like to challenge the notion that the sound was so very important . . . It certainly was an important aspect, but for me it was not the most important aspect. I believe the first mention of ECM in Jazz Forum—the Polish magazine—in the Fall/winter edition of 1971, summed up the first 15 releases. And I truly do believe that the artis- tic quality of those first 15 releases and the variety of music presented in those recordings was well summed up by Jazz Forum, basically saying that this is a new and very promising record label and that the quality of the music was very well received by the international critics. So yes, the sound was great, distinctly different from the ESP sound, distinctly different, or comparable to deutsche Grammophon, or to other classical recordings. But I’m still puzzled by the fact that you were able to gather basically the crème de la crème of people out there from America as well as Europe and bring them together and talk them into producing records like the first Chick Corea piano solo [Piano Improvisations Vol. 1, 1971]. Now, when the com-pany grew, how did these personal relationships with these musicians develop? what was the strategy for getting those people together and then having them record again and again for ECM? Many of the musicians, the most well-known, of course—keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek being two examples—are still recording with you. Could you go into the details of these enduring collaborations?

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difficult for me to say, but a basic term is trust and respect for each other. I think it was never a question of the fee. we discussed artistic directions. And so the word spread around: Here is somebody, a producer who tries to do something else. Musical friendships grew, and there was no need for contracts.

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How old were you then?oE

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I was seventeen. It’s forty years ago. It opened up a new audience for music that people around seventeen or eighteen were not really very interested in. How come Miles davis suddenly sold a quarter of a million records of a double album, Bitches Brew for Columbia Records, in 1970? It was phenomenal. It’s not the kind of jazz that people associated with the word “jazz.” It was not that at all. It was something very futuristic, something very new. And in ’72. I looked into the appendix of Steve’s amazing book on ECM [Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, 2007]. I don’t know any other record company that has done such a book as Horizons Touched. And you see, in the end, all the ECM productions with the recording dates—not the publishing dates, but the recording dates. So you see exactly, when he did the first record with Ralph Towner, when he did the first Garbarek record and all that. And it goes back a long way, but it’s easy for us to look back and say, these guys were stars. They were not stars, they were not that well-known. I think Manfred heard Ralph Towner on the weather Report album [I Sing the Body Electric, 1972], on “The Moors.” on this piece, Towner plays just an intro, just two minutes on the twelve-string guitar, and then he makes twenty-five albums with ECM until today.

RoUNdTABLE

well, it’s always easy to look back and say, yeah, ECM made so many records with this guy and with this person, with this artist. But what amazed me was Manfred’s vision. when the thing was actually happening, I was starting to notice ECM around 1971 or ’72, when I did my first radio programs.

To look back in many ways is a way to begin to unravel the different asso-ciations, the network if you like, but also to link up the network, so to speak, that links artists and artistic moments. And maybe it’s important to go back to what you said, that these musicians were not stars. ...

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What I mean is the premise, not the actual practice. As crude as it might seem, that there was a very clear Marxist-inflected attitude in the manifesto making of the October Revolution, in seeking to free oneself or

have this kind of master-slave dialectic And perhaps this may be one of ECM‘s central innovations: that it was a collaborative context for musicians rather than a kind of corporate entity. So the artists came in order to realize an artistic idea. You see what I mean? So it was not, how to do it, so you can sell a zillion copies of a recording. Of course, if you were successful, that is great and all of that. But I’m really interested in that dialectic between being independent and also being artistically viable: economically independent / artistically viable. That, for me, if there’s something that one can describe, is what really makes the longevity of ECM as an independent record label compelling.

But the encouraging thing was that these kinds of artistic ideas were also welcome to a lot of stores that were interested in these records, including more advanced records like the Music Improvisation Company, Music from Two Basses (1971) by Dave Holland and Barre Phillips, and the record with Derek Bailey and Dave Holland. These were records that were hardly produced for commercial reasons. I wanted to have a compact catalogue.

This is a very important point, because the music was not being produced in order to be inscribed into the commodity flow.

And this is still happening today. I mean, if you listen to Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge (2007), this is one of the most radical records I’ve heard in years. It completely redefines your whole notion about music: What is music, what is sound?

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I think part of this is also not underestimat-ing the audience. Generally, so much re-cord-company thinking is geared to talking down to people. ECM has never done that. We said, we’re interested in this music, and we believe there are people out there who could be interested as well.

ME

I had an affinity and maybe an instinct for something that really spoke to me strongly that I wanted to record. We had also a very good pressing quality, because we were allowed by our distributors to press with Deutsche Grammophon.

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So there was a kind of fetishization of the sound?

Of making a record

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

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Making a record and making it in the best sound

That’s what comes out of it.KL

For example, once Manfred told me, you know, I never put the obvious piece as the first piece on the record, which a lot of major companies did. They searched for the strongest piece from a session, they said, this is a potential hit, so we put this one first. He leads you toward an event. And sometimes it’s in the last third of the album that you hear the strongest piece of the session, the one that’s most moving. It’s a path; it leads you towards the event . . .

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Even though Manfred and Steve say that they only present the strongest . . . Watch out as a curator! Which room should we choose as the first one?

The direction I want to sort of take is that obviously . . . once you open those doors, you had to enter into all the doors because of your experience. Let’s talk about your encounter with a certain form of avant-garde music that was not connected to what the jazz musicians were doing—John Cage for example—even though there were affinities. When did this music enter the repertoire of ECM? Composed music, Norwegian music, these counterbalances between improvisation and written music?

We started with chamber music, also in the improvised form. Meredith Monk’s Dolmen Music (1981) was primarily written music, but not so strictly written that it could not be altered during the recording process. Later came Steve Reich with Music for 18 Musicians (1978), Music for a Large Ensemble (1980), and Tehillim (1981). We started ECM New Series in 1984 with Tabula Rasa by Arvo Pärt. For this recording Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett played together for the first time on the composition “Fratres.” In fact, two masters in their fields. Arvo Pärt was also very convinced by this idea of bringing these two musicians together.

Certainly. This is for me incredibly exciting and rich.

ME

This is a very important moment to bring in Keith Jarrett . . .

. . . who was there much earlier than 1984.

OE