I have to admit I really love the steely cold of ecm music.
I have spent every holiday of my life up in the Alps and the Himalaya and the Scottish and English and Irish and Alaskan and other mountain around the world.
And the cold crisp fresh sounds remind me of that environment.
Also I was a drummer long ago.
The sounds of each cymbal and drum are a joy to me.
The sheer sound of the music is so clear and pure.
But I can see why it is not for you.
I also love many of the LPs on your jazz thread.
They are full of fire and passion and dance and rhythm and the sheer brilliance flowing from Miles and all the rivers of music that sprang from him.
Both these styles of jazz are equally appealing to me.
But the ecm strand is newly discovered over the last year, and now I’ve begun to understand how it works, and so am just dipping into this seam of previously buried music.
But yes, that mid 70s thing that happened in those Pangea and Agartha and Dark Magus era is a music I can’t ever imagine growing out of.
Those groups tapped into the roots of music, which is a bunch of people hitting sticks and skins together and blowing whistles and horns and dancing in a group.
I understand perfectly that you like that kind of music. It’s nice and inspired. However I need more rythm, urgency, instant creativity, a bit of madness or originality…ECM is too much written, ordonnated, agenced, like classical music.
But I have however a dozen of ecm albums I like a lot, like first Metheny albums.
Recent ecm I like a lot: sonar and Nik Bartsch Ronin.
Sonar are a Swiss band from Zurich lead by Stephan Thelen. They play music that has some similarities with Nik Bartsch. It’s highly structured jazz/avant rock - guitar led. They have done two albums recently with David Torn - another coming next year too. Try Vortex.
The recording quality is however superb. It’s very similar to Nik Bartsch Ronin which is on ECM. And one player is from ECM.
But yes, not ECM. Error of me.
Love the name of the Bartsch LP Holon.
It’s a Koestler term meaning that any object is made of other entities that Are its parts, and is included in other entities of which it is a part.
So things are not discrete. They are links or nodes in chains of being.
The more I listen to ecm bands the more I like the label.
Eich the door…
Marc Johnson Swept Away
Thomas Stanko various
Jakob Bro with Jon Christiansen
Peter Erskine
Nick Bartsch Ronin various LPs
Julia Hulsmann This is not America
Ralph Towner Piscean Dance
Masson the deep
Iyer Break Stuff
