Sounds from a White Room

By JAY COCKS

ECM starts its second decade as the world's top jazz label

Imagine a typical jazz recording session: a bunch of cooled-out dudes breeze into the studio some time between soon and whenever, take a drink or two, pass some smoke and lay down some tracks by and by. No sweat, no strain, see you later.

Forget it. That kind of scene may get by--marginally--in the movies, but at ECM Records it would be considered strictly for the tourist trade. There is a sort of house high-seriousness about all the diverse jazz on the ECM label. For its sessions, one must attune one's mythic misconceptions accordingly.

Typically, Manfred Eicher, 35, the founder, manager and premier producer of ECM, will fly his musicians into a Norwegian studio nicknamed the Whale, right in the heart of downtown Oslo. The musicians start to work as soon as they shake off the jet lag. An album usually takes two days to record--a day for each side--with a third day reserved for mixing. Very businesslike, minimal distractions. Oslo is short on hotspots likely to divert attention from the matter at hand. For fun, the musicians trundle off to the Edvard Munch Museum.

The image of jazz musicians recreating beside one of Munch's images of spiritual frenzy and psychic fear is not lacking in amusing undertones or, for that matter, in cultural cross references: Munch worked out of the same abyss, after all, as Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman. ECM is a haven for many of the descendants of these jazz giants and stresses a kind of stylistic riskiness underpinned by sobriety. The music that has done the most to build the five-man European company into the world's most thriving jazz label ranges in style and quality from the vaulting improvisational rhapsodies of Keith Jarrett to the congenial jazz-rock fusion of Pat Metheny and the slick sketches of Chick Corea. Jarrett, Metheny and Corea account for most of the label's top ten albums. Jarrett's ravishingly beautiful The Koeln Concert, released in 1975, has sold more than 750,000 copies--a strong showing for a double album in any league, even rock.

This sort of corporate taste, together with an obviously strong case of business smarts, has got ECM a felicitous distribution arrangement with Warner Bros. Records, which takes care of manufacturing and marketing and gives Eicher a free creative hand. Eicher, in turn, gives them not only jazz that sells records--a rare enough commodity--but jazz to boast about, jazz that sets a style and a standard. A young jazz musician would want an ECM label the way a short-story writer would want to be published in The New Yorker.

"I am a European," the German-born Eicher noted during a talk in ECM's unprepossessing offices overlooking a parking lot in Munich. "And I'm very consciously a product of this continent. I will instinctively link everything I do with the musical achievements accumulated in these latitudes for more than 2,500 years." Long on cerebration and sometimes short on funk, the Eicher approach evolved from early infatuations with Coleman, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Talking about jazz, he still sounds like a booster for the home team. "As much as I like and appreciate the African spontaneity that propels so much jazz, I feel that the Western orbit has a specific quality to add. Complex polyphonies. Extended silences. The value of the contemplative."

When he was still in high school, Eicher hitchhiked from his home in Lindau, on Lake Constance, into Munich to catch a Dizzy Gillespie concert, and a few years later, on scholarship to the august Berlin Academy of Music, he lived on yogurt so he would not have to skimp on his record collection. Production-assistant jobs around various Munich recording studios kept him in curds and vinyl until he met up with Karl Egger, a burly purveyor of discount audio and records. Egger suggested to Eicher that they record displaced American jazzmen who had fled the rock-dominated music biz back home for the burgeoning jazz scene in Munich. "It was an era," Eicher recalls, "when the new artists were there to be grabbed."

Egger bankrolled, Eicher produced, and in 1970 the first record on ECM was pressed: Free at Last by the superb pianist Mai Waldron. Only 500 copies of the record were originally turned out, but 14,300 eventually sold. Now an initial ECM pressing averages 10,000 albums for its established acts and 6,000 for the three or four unknowns it introduces every year.

There are no long-term contracts at ECM, even for the stars. "Jarrett, like all good jazzers, values personal friendship higher than any written piece of paper," says Eicher. Indeed, it is unlikely that any contemporary jazz artist could find elsewhere the particular combination of creative congeniality, "very fair" royalty rates and marketing clout that ECM has to offer. This has led, almost inevitably, to the threat of corporate complacency, a cloud over the cachet. ECM has taken some heat for issuing smug, snug suburban jazz, and, perhaps in response, Eicher has brought some fringe groups into the fold. He has released two records by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who lay down a kind of ripped and fragmented aural collage, as well as an acetylene album by Old and New Dreams, a group of former Coleman sidemen, populated by such wizards as Don Cherry and Charlie Haden. "We want controlled contrast," Eicher says, and to prove it ECM has released two albums by Steve Reich that are less jazz than free-form contemporary classical, tonal experiments that sound like the air currents heard in a silent white room.

Eicher, who is divorced, still fuels up on yogurt and black coffee but does not go to many jazz clubs these days, although his Munich digs might be mistaken for the apartment of an affluent student. The place is crammed with books and records, but Eicher recently declined to spend $20,000 for a Josef Albers oil. He did not have the room for it, he said. Besides, the next time he is recording in Oslo, he can always go look at a Munch or two.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Franz Spelman/Munich

With reporting by Franz Spelman/Munich

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