People with initiative and imagination use the valuable interlude between leaving school and starting college to enlarge their experience. They travel to exotic places, work abroad at unusual jobs. Faced with this opportunity in 1977, I filled the nine months at my disposal by working in an office in the provincial town where I had grown up. I lived with my parents. In the evenings I played badminton or squash and read Dickens and George Eliot. My job was as a clerk in the actuarial department of Mercantile and General Reinsurance (a company that insured insurance companies). One of the trainee actuaries, Rob, was a guy in his early twenties who had moved to Cheltenham from London with his wife soon after they’d graduated. Rob was a hi-fi nut and invited me round to their semi-detached house to hear his system in action. Jazz-rock was his thing. I was mainly interested in the rock bit of this alliance. My tastes had been formed by prog (Van Der Graaf Generator) and heavy (Mountain) rock, but I had recently bought my first Bob Dylan album: Desire. I was ready for a change—in music if not in circumstances.
Rob had the best stereo I had ever heard or, for that matter, seen: each speaker loomed like the monolith in 2001. The first track we listened to that evening was by Return to Forever. It was followed by a very heavy piece by Miles Davis from Live-Evil, and parts of a record with a really nice cover (pieces of fruit or something on a sky-reflecting puddle?) by someone called Keith Jarrett. The last track we listened to was by Tangerine Dream. I’d been a big Hawkwind fan so I had an idea where this stuff was coming from: outer space, presumably.
Speaking of which, I also had another couple of graduate friends whom I’d met at the Cheltenham Science Fiction Group. I didn’t like sci-fi but I did collect superhero comics and there was a tacit overlap between the two things. In any case, I’d only joined to try to make some friends. Paul and Jan were more alternative than Rob and his wife (it was at their house that I ate my first ever vegetable curry). Musically they were mainly into Little Feat and Robert Palmer (whose first album, lest we forget, was very cool) but, like Rob, they were heavily into Tangerine Dream; they were also keen on an album by Weather Report called Mysterious Traveller (which had a sort of sci-fi cover).
The connections between some of these sounds—back then one always referred to music as “sounds”—to which I had been exposed will be evident to everyone reading this. Jarrett, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, and Chick Corea had all played with Miles Davis during his groundbreaking electric phase. (Jarrett actually plays on “What I Say,” that stomping track from Live-Evil.) This didn’t register with me at the time; nor did the bigger point—that for squandering nine months in a tedious office job in Cheltenham I had been compensated by accidentally stumbling on some of the most advanced music being made anywhere in the world. I emphasize the circumstances because there was nothing exotic about my discovery of what I would later come to recognize as the ECM sound: it came sandwiched between Return to Forever and Tangerine Dream. The importance of the shift in taste that came in its wake, however, was enormous. This became obvious in the summer, when I drove around France and Germany for a month with two friends in a Mini Cooper. We had each made compilation tapes of our favorite tracks, and my main memory of this, my first trip outside of Britain, is of driving for hours on end, arguing about what music to play. I wanted to hear selections from Belonging, Dansere, Arbour Zena, Agharta, and Black Market. My friends lobbied for Supertramp and Be Bop Deluxe.
I rest my case.
A special significance attaches to the first piece of music you play on moving into a new place-especially if it’s the first place you’ve ever moved into. After setting up my stereo in my room at college, I played Jarrett’s “Long As You Know You’re Living Yours.” This was how I announced my arrival musically to my neighbors. These neighbors might have guessed a jazz nut had taken up residence but my small stash of ECM LPs had not lured me more deeply into jazz. I recognized some of the names (Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal) that cropped up on various albums, but I didn’t hear or see what this distinctive ECM sound—and look—was an offshoot of. And because I didn’t know what had gone before I didn’t fully appreciate the novelty of what I was hearing. It was years before I found out, because my interest in this kind of music tailed off as I was drawn toward more mainstream student fare. The remainder of my time at Oxford was dominated by Bob Dylan (who played Earls Court and Blackbushe in 1978) and, belatedly, in my third year, punk. In the early Eighties, when I moved to London, I was completely caught up in the new wave or post-punk scene.
I didn’t return to ECM until the mid-Eighties, when I moved into a shared house in Brixton. Chris, one of the people in this house, had a big jazz collection and many ECM records I’d never seen or heard before. None of us had jobs, which meant we were free to spend the days reading theory (which I’d not done at university, oddly), smoking pot (which, even more oddly, I’d also neglected to do at university), and listening to music. This was when I got properly into the history of jazz —and the starting point, as often as not, was ECM. What had once been the vanguard was now part of the heritage that ECM—a new vanguard —drew upon and reinvigorated. By making a tradition accessible, ECM offered a way back into jazz; but it also pointed ahead to the kinds of music I would listen to for the next twenty years. This is worth stressing, not simply with regard to the reception of the material (listening) but with its creation in the first place. To have provided excellent recording opportunities for American jazz musicians would have been a worthy but limited enterprise; the ECM agenda was more far-reaching: to establish conditions and ways of working most conducive to the emergence of new musical possibilities.
Chris had a bunch of records by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I loved the pretentious name and the picture on one of the albums of these nice guys sitting outside a French café, but much of their music was just a din. Then Chris played a track called “Charlie M” which turned me on to both the Art Ensemble and Mingus. Chris also played the various Old and New Dreams albums a lot, and it was through them that I got into Ornette Coleman. In some ways the original version of “Lonely Woman” on The Shape of Jazz to Come still seems to me to be a re-working of the one I first heard, by Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, and Dewey Redman.
I was starting to see how the web of collaboration, influence, and innovation extended the jazz tradition into the present—and, as the Art Ensemble insisted, into the future. But ECM was expanding my musical horizons not just through time and history, but geographically, across space. No one played a bigger part in this than Cherry. I first heard of the great Egyptian singer Om Calsoum in the dedication to “Arabian Nightingale” on El Corazón. It was years before I heard her voice, but that was the first mention of her name. I started listening to Augustus Pablo after hearing Cherry play Pablo-style dub melodica on “Roland Alphonso,” also on El Corazón. That’s another point about ECM: although there is widespread agreement that Jarrett’s Köln Concert is crucial to any account of the label’s development, there is, I suspect, a huge diversity of opinion as to which albums have had the biggest impact on individual listeners. Objectively, El Corazón—a series of duets between Cherry and Blackwell—is not a major album, but it’s at the heart of my collection. There is, in other words, something profoundly democratic about the ECM approach; great moments crop up anywhere, in any format and combination of musicians. Greatness is always a possibility, partly because the distinction between leader and supporting musicians in these circumstances is often hard to fix.
Grazing Dreams is another obviously canonical record. Officially it’s a Collin Walcott–led production, but I came to it because Cherry was part of it. This was one of the first albums on which I consciously heard a tabla being played; the other was Zakir Hussain’s Making Music. These two albums led the way to Indian classical music—and for me that began with ECM too: Shankar’s Who’s To Know and Pancha Nadai Pallavi. I am not saying, of course, that ECM was the only possible starting point (how had I missed out on Shakti?), but in my case it almost always was. The corollary of this is that even when it wasn’t, it could have been.
I have never loved the voice of a female singer the way I love R. A. Ramamani’s. I first heard her singing on an album with Charlie Mariano and the Karnataka College of Percussion (what a blow it was, to learn that she was married to the head of the college). This wasn’t an ECM record, but it was, essentially, a live version of an album recorded years earlier on ECM. My friend Chris had first played this for me, and years later he told me of a new album that Mariano had recorded with a Lebanese oud player. The tail, it turned out, was wagging the dog. Mariano was one of a number of musicians guesting on Blue Camel (Enja) by Rabih Abou-Khalil—whose first album, Nafas, had been released by ECM.
ECM, in other words, was the pattern at the center of the carpet of almost all the music I was listening to. And the figure at the center of this pattern was Jarrett. There were ECM albums I didn’t care for, there were Jarrett albums that I didn’t like so much—but there were no ECM albums that I was more entranced by than Jarrett’s. I mean that literally.
What changed when I went round to my friend Rob’s house back in 1977 was not just the kind of music I could listen to, but what I listened to music for, how I listened to it. By the 1980s this had become a matter almost of habit: what I wanted more than anything else from music was to trance out to it. No album of Jarrett’s was more trance-like than Eyes of the Heart and I was surprised to discover that people who knew more about music than I did not share my sense that this was a masterpiece. (What a bore it must be, to have impeccable taste!) It’s a recording of a live performance from 1976, the opening phase of which features Jarrett on soprano sax—mind-boggling in itself. He then moves over to the piano, setting up rhythmic ripples with Haden and Motian. Although it’s a quartet recording, Redman is nowhere to be heard (he’d gone to the bar to get a glass of wine, apparently), and after a while Haden also drops out. In his biography of Jarrett, Ian Carr explains that the pianist spent much of the gig vamping, just waiting for the others to come in. In this vacancy, Carr claims, can be heard the imminent disintegration of the group. Well, I was happy to wait indefinitely, the longer the better in fact, because the infinitely prolonged suspense makes the climactic reintegration of the group—with just five minutes of the second side left to run—all the more intense. And the waiting, in any case, never felt like waiting; it felt like being where you wanted to be, never wanting to leave, but still curious to know who else might turn up, what else might happen. I never have this feeling when the Jarrett-Peacock-DeJohnette trio play standards, but I get it every moment when they play those surging, tidal originals: “Sun Prayer,” “Dancing,” “Endless,” “Lifeline,” “Desert Sun,” “The Cure.” Except that’s not quite true, because the greatest moments of all occur when a standard turns into a Jarrett original, when “I Fall in Love Too Easily” smoulders into “The Fire Within” (on the fourth CD of At the Blue Note). These transitions express in miniature the larger contribution of ECM to musical history, as the accumulated riches of a tradition give way to something that lies beyond it, new, but waiting to be discovered. At the risk of projecting a listener’s response onto the music’s creators, it seems to me that an unspoken assumption underwrites many of the most successful ECM recordings: namely, that by the late twentieth century you could only make jazz if you were simultaneously trying to find a way out of it. These days I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to the Australian trio The Necks. This wouldn’t have happened—it’s possible, in fact, that The Necks wouldn’t have got into their hypnotic, hour-long post-jazz (post-everything!) grooves—had Jarrett’s trio not led the way.
Throughout the 1980s, one of the main ways in which I heard new music was to get together with my friends Chris and Charlie and listen to whatever one or the other of us had recently come across. It was incredibly nerdy but it was frequently momentous too. Musically, we went through many of the same phases together; and then, in the early Nineties, Charlie began to immature with age. We couldn’t believe it, but our friend, the person with whom we had listened to Coltrane, to Hariprasad Chaurasia (first heard on Making Music), to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (not to be confused with the Khans singing with Garbarek on Ragas and Sagas), began listening to…house music. Then techno. It was one thing to trance out to Jarrett or Trane, but the idea that you could escape Samsara by freaking out to psychedelic trance! Chris and I were both—I was going to say skeptical but incredulous would be a better word. Inevitably, my incredulity turned to evangelical zeal, once I too had succumbed. For the next several years, in fact, I listened only to dance music. Circumstances meant that Chris—married with two kids, unable to go out all night—never followed suit. He was stuck at home, listening to his boring old ECM records. Besides, he was never quite convinced that the stuff we were listening to was anything other than drug or party music. Until, that is, Nils Petter Molvaer released his first album. Khmer (1997) was not, strictly speaking, dance music but neither, strictly speaking, was it jazz. Molvaer’s sound obviously owed as least as much to various kinds of dance and electronic music as it did to jazz (specifically, to take us right back to where we started, to Miles’s electric period of the early Seventies). And, amazingly, it was on ECM —who even came up with remixes of some of the tracks.
I’ve forgotten much of the music I heard during this ecstatic interlude, and I’m embarrassed by some of the little I can remember—but I’ve never stopped listening to Nils. Recent ECM releases are of a very high standard, but in many ways Khmer (the follow-up, Solid Ether, kept dissolving into a clatter of drum’n’bass) is a high point in the ECM project precisely because it seems so conspicuously at odds—sampling! remixes!—with the ethos of the company. (Having the courage of one’s convictions is, as Nietzsche pointed out, a pretty modest virtue; “having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions” is another matter altogether.) The ECM sound is as recognizable as Blue Note’s from the 1960s. It’s a style of music as much as a label; unlike Blue Note, it has never become a reductive or formulaic one. Which is why, of course, we are still listening to the old records (a CD of Arbour Zena is winging its way to me in the post; what will that be like, twenty-five years after first hearing it?) and listening out for what’s coming next (a new double live CD of Jarrett playing solo piano is due out in a couple of months; what will that be like?).
The music playing on my stereo as I write this is the first ECM track that I ever listened to, the piece I heard round at my friend Rob’s house, back in Cheltenham in 1977 after a day’s clerical drudgery at the M & G Reinsurance Co: Jarrett’s “Long As You Know You’re Living Yours.” I couldn’t have lived mine without these editions of contemporary music to keep me company, to show me how.
Geoff Dyer’s many books include Out of Sheer Rage, But Beautiful, and The Ongoing Moment. This essay is excerpted from Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, edited by Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths and published in England by Granta Books.
