ECM’s landmark series of audiophile vinyl releases from their huge back catalogue continues with three new discs, each of which combines historical importance with superb music. They are all, in their different ways, under appreciated or underexposed recordings deserving of further attention. Despite their legendary status, I hadn’t actually heard any of them before.
Afric Pepperbird
Afric Pepperbird is from 1970 and the very earliest days of the label, when it was the seventh release. It has the reputation of a kind of foundational text for several reasons: it was Jan Garbarek’s first recording for the label, and the first for the new Nordic jazz which was to become one of the great strengths for ECM over the years. This was also the recording that label founder Manfred Eicher included in a letter to Keith Jarrett asking him to consider working with him, using it to illustrate the kind of music he thought might appeal. Despite this dry, Dead Sea Scroll type significance as a worthy document blah blah blah, Afric Pepperbird is a record of such shockingly convulsive oomph, joy and power that it can still knock your socks off.
Garbarek, then aged 24`, had not yet attained his signature sound. The influence of free jazz and the New Thing is evident in his Ayler-esque squawks and the furious energy of the group’s performance. And what a group. Arild Andersen on bass and – in a charming typo reproduced on the new sleeve – “African thump piano”; Terje Rypdal playing a rocky Rickenbacker guitar; and a masterful Jon Christensen on drums. They are all in their twenties and look like musical revolutionaries. It’s both marvellously of its time (Garbarek even plays a Yakety Sax style Benny Hill-ism for one brief phrase) and curiously prophetic. Hear it and gawp.
Luminessence
Jarrett and Garbarek’s Luminessence – yes, the album that gave the series its name – is from only four years later but a new style has already crystallised. Jarrett – who doesn’t appear on the album but writes the music for a small chamber orchestra that Garbarek improvises over – is an ECM regular: just one week earlier he had completed his first European Quartet album, ‘Belonging’. Garbarek now sounds totally like the Garbarek we know, the keening corncrake wail of his tenor or soprano sax crying out against the strange, often detuned-sounding rise and fall of the strings. It’s ancient and modern at the same time and completely hypnotic.
Azimuth
Azimuth is the 1977 debut recording by the trio who would adopt its title as their group name. Newly famous because the popular music star Drake used a sampled excerpt from Side Two’s ‘The Tunnel’ in one of his songs, it’s a beautiful recording whose blend of voice, electronics and trumpet (without benefit of bass or drums) created a new form of chamber jazz that, at the time, was too idiosyncratic to find its audience. Heard now, it sounds perfect; chilled, even.
The interweaving sounds of Norma Winstone’s pure-toned voice, Kenny Wheeler’s flugelhorn and – especially – John Taylor’s analogue synthesiser-washes and near-motoric pulses are entirely successful, with the role of producer Manfred Eicher also crucial in the way the studio was used as an instrument in its own right, layering tracks to enable Wheeler and Winstone to create chorales of themselves. Completely of a chronological piece with the sonic experiments of Krautrock or Bowie and Eno in their Berlin phase, Azimuth is a massive achievement.
Summary
Listening intensely to all three records can also be a curiously moving experience. Half a century ago, and they sound so fresh, so new, so – whisper it – optimistic, despite the Cold War and the threat of nuclear wipeout. The special qualities of ECM also seem less about any particular house style or aesthetic than the simple fact that someone appeared to care about the quality of the music on each stage of its journey from conception to finished product. That care and attention continues in the Luminessence programme, with erudite liner notes by Steve Lake for the Afric and Azimuth titles, satisfyingly thick cardboard gatefold sleeves, and nice fat platters. Fledgling labels please copy.
