Manfred Eicher and ECM
Record labels come and go, and even those that survive rarely maintain their independence. The ECM label has been around for almost forty years now, and during that time every other jazz label of note has changed ownership at least once. Blue Note, Fantasy, Pablo, Concord, even the giants RCA and Columbia, have been bought and sold, the largest whale-sized mega-labels apparently just as susceptible to these disruptions and transitions as the smallest fish in the sea. But ECM has retained its independence through it all, and not just in terms of who owns the business, but even more obviously in the company’s unwavering commitment to an artistic vision and a set of values.
Manfred Eicher, the founder and creative force behind ECM, has probably exerted as much influence on the jazz world as is possible without playing an instrument. He not only has been the visionary producer guiding important recordings by Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jan Garbarek, Egberto Gismonti, and Bill Frisell, among others – but he was also a strong advocate for these musicians before they were widely known in the music world. Time and time again, Eicher has championed musicians off the beaten track – geographically as well as stylistically – and given visibility to brilliant artists who, without Eicher, might never have been able to reach a global audience.
Taking chances on lesser known musicians in this way seems like a risky approach. But somehow Eicher takes out all the risk – at least for the fans purchasing ECM’s recordings. Over the years, I have often bought an ECM release, despite knowing little or nothing about the musicians featured – but I have done so with confidence. ECM has such high quality standards and such a firm commitment to artistry, that I know in advance that is unlikely I will be disappointed by what I hear. And I may just encounter something fresh and exciting that I would never otherwise have discovered. How many jazz labels have ever instilled this degree of confidence in their judgments? How many still are able to do so? Today the answer is, sad to say, very few.
Eicher keeps a low profile. I understand that he hasn’t given a media interview in English in more than five years. Indeed, the ECM label prefers to let its music speak itself. (When was the last time you enjoyed the liner notes on a ECM release?) But Stuart Nicholson, one of the most astute jazz critics writing today, recently returned from Germany where he spent some time in conversation with Eicher. We are delighted to publish this interview on jazz.com. In conjunction with this interview, I am offering my choices for a dozen essential tracks from ECM’s first decade. Finally, Stuart is also sharing with us his Jazz Letter from Europe, which is the first of what we hope will be an on-going series.
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
December 25, 2007 · 0 comments
Tags: ted gioiaOscar Peterson (1925-2007)
With the passing of Oscar Peterson, we have lost one of the last representatives of the great post-war generation of pianists who redefined the role of the keyboard in jazz music. We will almost certainly never again see such a concentration of creativity and individuality as the jazz world experienced during the late 1940s and 1950s when most fans first heard the music of Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell, Erroll Garner, Bill Evans, Lennie Tristano, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk, Ahmad Jamal, Dave Brubeck, and George Shearing. Most of these pianists are now gone. We will need to be content with appreciating their artistry through recordings and the occasional surviving video -- and in our cherished memories of seeing them perform in person.
Oscar Peterson was perhaps the easiest of these musicians to appreciate. His strong sense of swing and virtuoso technique could even move listeners who had little appreciation of the jazz idiom. The virtues of his work were so striking and obvious that it is something of a puzzle how otherwise astute critics could so easily ignore them. Miles Davis, in a famous put-down, once commented that Peterson sounded as if he had to learn how to play the blues. The late Martin Williams – one of the most astute critics ever to write about jazz – dismissed Peterson’s work as a “stockpile of clichés . . . He seems to know every stock riff and lick in the history of jazz.” For both Davis and Williams, the sheer abundance of Peterson’s work, the dramatic and rapid-fire manner he tossed off melodic ideas, somehow made him suspect. Peterson was the improvisatory equivalent of a fire hose, and these critics wanted a small bottle of Evian water.
But there is a place in every art form for fireworks and bravura gestures. Peterson was the most dramatic pianist of his generation, and to see him at top form was an exhilarating experience. I recall guitarist Joe Pass (a great virtuoso in his own right) once noting that if you wanted to play fast with Oscar, he could play fast; and if you wanted to go faster, Oscar could go faster -- Pass shaking his head at this point, like the fan at a NASCAR event who has just seen some death-defying move on the track. To play fast and clean and true is a litmus test for jazz musicians. It always has been and always will be. And among jazz players of his era, no one played faster or cleaner or truer than Oscar Peterson.
Here are some of my favorite Oscar Peterson moments: his driving two-hand boogie work on “Blues Etude”; a surprisingly restrained and introspective solo version of Ellington’s “Lady of the Lavender Mist” from an early Pablo release; his duets with Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Eldridge and several other trumpeters from this same period; his sensitive contributions as an accompanist on a number of classic Verve recordings; his underrated Nat-King-Cole-ish vocal work; and his various collaborations with the great Joe Pass. If you haven’t heard the latter combination in a while, check out this clip of Peterson and Pass playing “My One and Only Love.”
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
December 24, 2007 · 3 comments
Tags: ted gioiaAbout Jazz.com's Music Reviews
For more than a year, a team of twenty-three critics has been working under my direction on an ambitious project to review the most important performances from the century long history of jazz music. But with an interesting twist: while many reviews of jazz CDs have been written over the years, we wanted to focus on individual tracks.
This is a Herculean task, and before we are finished, we will need to tackle more than ten thousand reviews. But such a project is necessary to fill a gap in the jazz world. For a variety of reasons, jazz fans need – and deserve – a more focused source of music criticism than is provided by the standard CD review.
The advantages of reviewing individual tracks are many. By focusing on songs instead of CDs, a reviewer can give readers much clearer guidance. The critic no longer needs to fret over how to assess a CD that might have one or two strong tracks mixed in with weaker material. And an emphasis on individual songs frees us from the confusion wrought by fickle record label execs, who constantly re-package the same material in different compilations, ensuring that the CD recommended one year is out of print the next. But above all, the rapid rise of i-Pods and legal sources of downloading suggests that the future of music will be driven by the track not the disk, and reviewers need to adapt to this brave new world of electronic commerce.
Traditionalists should not fret about this change. In many ways, we are merely returning to the way the music world previously operated, when the industry focused on selling “singles,” the A-side of a 78 or 45 rpm record. But even before the rise of recorded sound, music was composed, performed and consumed one piece at a time. Modern technology is simply returning us to this natural state of affairs.
Another difference in jazz.com reviews is a move away from the 1-5 star rating system that has often been employed to evaluate recordings. In practice, few records received one or two stars, and even fewer were awarded five star reviews. As a result, most records were lumped together into a three or four star category that made it difficult for fans – or critics – to make more nuanced evaluations. At jazz.com we have adopted a 100 point scale, which allows much clearer and more subtle distinctions. (A guide to this 100 point system can be found here.)
But the value of any system of reviews depends, in the final analysis, on the critical judgments of the people making the evaluations. I have worked hard to build a team of smart, knowledgeable reviewers. I have tracked down specialists with deep expertise in specific areas of the jazz tradition, and given them a forum to share their know how. We have not made any attempt to "dumb down" our reviews, or squeeze them into some generic mass market formula. Sometimes they are provocative, or perhaps even go against the grain of received opinion, but they will always be interesting and passionate. The end result is a unique resource for jazz fans. And (unlike most sources of reviews) we allow the reader to add comments and contrary opinions.
I say “end result,” but in fact we still have much to do. We continue to expand our team of jazz critics, and we have an aggressive plan to publish a significant number of new reviews every month.
In the meantime, take a test drive. See what we have to say about some of your favorite jazz artists by using our music review search engine in the left sidebar on this page. And check back again on a regular basis to see what new additions we have made.
Finally, if you have deep expertise in jazz music and strong writing skills, you can inquire about joining us in our grand reviewing project by sending an email to reviews@jazz.com.
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
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December 20, 2007 · 0 comments
Tags: ted gioiaRemembering Frank Morgan (1933-2007)
The jazz world is mourning the loss of alto saxophonist Frank Morgan, who passed away on Friday after a battle with colon cancer. Morgan would have turned 74 this coming Sunday.
Thirty years ago, Frank Morgan had disappeared so completely from the jazz scene that Leonard Feather and Gene Norman assumed he was dead when they began working on a reissue of his recordings from the 1950s. But Morgan, like so many others of his generation, found his career eclipsed by an out-of-control drug habit that ravaged his personal life and resulted in long years of incarceration.
This was a tragedy that was all too typical of the West Coast scene of the period. Morgan would later recall that one of the finest bands of his career was a San Quentin ensemble from 1962, which also featured Art Pepper, Jimmy Bunn and Frank Butler. (In the near future, I will be publishing on jazz.com my account of another drug-and-prison casualty of the era, the great trumpeter Dupree Bolton.)
Morgan was one of the last survivors of the thriving Central Avenue scene that served as the center of the Los Angeles jazz world until the late 1940s. Morgan’s father, guitarist Stanley Morgan, ran a popular after hours clubs in the area, the Casa Blanca. Many jazz legends, including Charlie Parker and Erroll Garner, participated in jam sessions at the Casa Blanca, and young Frank Morgan got a chance to match musical wits with the world class talent while he was still a teenager.
Morgan was a master of the bebop vocabulary, but he made only a handful of recording before disappearing into California’s penal institutions. When he tried to resurrect his career in the 1980s, Morgan had to start from the bottom rung. Even jazz insiders were mostly unaware of Morgan and what he could do on the horn. But a talent this large would not stay hidden for long. Even before he secured a recording contract, he shook up the audience at a Duke Ellington tribute concert on the UCLA campus where Morgan stole the show as a virtually unknown player in the midst of an all-star lineup.
His subsequent recordings garnered glowing reviews, and Morgan found himself gaining the recognition in his fifties that should have been his in his twenties and thirties. He recorded extensively, toured regularly, and in 1991, at age 57 he won the Down Beat Critics Poll as best alto saxophonist.
We had grown used to Morgan beating the odds. His comeback in the 1980s seemed almost a miracle to those who had written him off as a casualty of the scene. After a stroke in 1998, doctors told him he would never play again, but he was performing again within six months. But Frank Morgan finally succumbed last Friday. We will miss his presence, but continue to celebrate his legacy.
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
December 17, 2007 · 1 comment
Tags: ted gioiaIntroducing the 'Dozens'
In the coming days, I will introduce you to some of the more interesting features on our brand new site. One of my favorites is our on-going series known as The Dozens. Some of you may be familiar with ‘playing the dozens’ – an African-American tradition based on informal, taunting exchanges. Our approach to the ‘dozens’ is a bit different. We select twelve exemplary jazz recordings based on a theme, and submit them for your enjoyment and debate. We have already published a number of these celebrations of the jazz art form (see complete list here). Some are straightforward (Steve Greenlee selects twelve essential John Coltrane performances), while others are whimsical and fun (Alan Kurtz’s celebration of the masterpieces of crime jazz). But they are always prepared with fastidious care, and the deep expertise that our writers draw from a lifetime of jazz listening. You will see more of the ‘dozens’ in the future, and from time to time I will draw attention to them in our blog.
For a description of other jazz.com features, go here.
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
December 12, 2007 · 0 comments
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