There's an awful lot of compact discs being made these days. Good, bad and indifferent albums swamp the market, and so much goes unnoticed by the media and the public at large. In this age of quantity, where quality has become the first victim, the ECM record label stands out like a sunflower in a petunia patch. With a distinctive brand image embodying a philosophy that has arguably created a musical genre of its own, it is a rarity among record labels today - while the rest of the record industry has seen sales decline, ECM's market share has increased.
The reason is its strong brand image. Yet ECM can be many things to many people. For some, an ECM recording has the cachet of expensive designer clothes, not only because you have to pay more, but because once you've got that really, really expensive hi-fi, you want an equivalent in recorded sound.
With cover-art of austere yet enigmatic beauty, ECM recordings don't look out of place on the coffee table alongside that all important illustrated guide to Chinese porcelain (two volumes, of course). With astonishingly detailed recorded sound, ECM becomes a passport to a sonic landscape that sounds even better with a glass of Moet & Chandon. For others, ECM is quite simply the most adventurous record label in jazz, with a wide range of artists, each with their own distinctive musical imprimatur.
The central thrust of the label's musical direction remains a personal reflection of the musical aesthetic of label boss Manfred Eicher. "Our approach has a lot to do with the example of chamber music, and with a kind of poetic approach to music," he explains. "My preference is towards that which has to do with lucidity, transparency and the movements of sound. It's not only the notes but the thought behind them that sculpts the sound."
Eicher's "sound sculptures" represent an ordered calm in the often frantic world of jazz. Subdued rhythmic and linear events are explored with a serene, often minimalistic approach to improvisation, creating an evocative tranquility without sacrificing emotional or lyrical intensity. Improvisations unfurl with the certainty and logic of a pre-written composition in a way that reaches beyond jazz to beguile classical followers. Yet such music has the capacity to appeal to melodically-minded rock fans who never realised such music existed.
Eicher, who studied at the Berlin Academy of Music, had begun to make a name for himself as recording assistant with the classical label Deutsche Grammophon, when he formed ECM, an acronym for Editions of Contemporary Music, in Munich at the end of the 1960s. From the outset, he took scant regard of conventional notions of what was and what was not commercial. He simply followed his own instincts about who to record and how it should be done. In particular, he believed that the care in recording orchestral and chamber music he had learnt in the classical world should be applied to jazz.
He took enormous care about microphone placement to capture the harmonious interplay of instruments. "I didn't put the drummer in a room at the end of the studio," he explains. "We allowed a certain amount of controlled leakage to get an accurate sound picture." From the very first ECM album, the music was not a dry recreation of a moment in time. Instead the recorded sounds contained a vibrancy and reverberation that assumed a life of their own.
But the musical ethos of the label and the quality of the recorded sound are only part of the ECM package you buy into. The cover art quickly established a visual signature for the label. Eicher has an abiding interest in cinematography and was responsible for music production in films by Jean Luc Goddard, Theo Angelopoulos and Xavier Koller. For ECM, he collaborated with Barbara and Burkhart Wojirsch and Dieter Rehm in creating cover-art that was an aesthetic entry point to the music within.
Unlike Reid Miles, whose influential photography for the Blue Note label in the 1950s and 1960s portrayed pieces of "frozen music" through black and white photos of the artists themselves, ECM sleeves feature impressionistic photographic images. These landscapes, seascapes and clouds, reinforced by minimalist sans serif typography, produce a wholly distinctive brand image for the label. "It is important to set a tone, to sense the atmosphere of the music and to give a clear sign of our intentions, a dialectic of sound and image," says Eicher, who is now a youthful-looking 58.
In 1975 came the label's biggest hit, Koln Concert by Keith Jarrett. Its success was unexpected, since the state of the balance sheet has never influenced Eicher's artistic judgment. If he likes a piece of music, if it sounds - as he puts it - "right", then he goes with it. "We had no idea it would be so big," he recalls. "It just kept selling and selling, and sales are now in excess of four million." Always on the lookout for new artists, Eicher spotted guitarist Pat Metheny in 1975, who built a hugely successful career on the label before moving elsewhere.
EICHER has succeeded in creating one of the most respected independent labels in jazz, with many buying albums simply on the basis of the music ECM stands for. This remarkable brand loyalty enabled the launch of the ECM New Series in 1984, which began turning heads in classical music.
A forum for fresh approaches to the standard classical repertoire, Eicher has produced works by the likes of Heinz Holliger, Gavin Bryars, Steve Reich, John Adams and Giya Kancheli. Eicher successfully introduced the Estonian composer, Arvo Part, whose 1993 album, Te Deum, was a top-five classical hit, while Officium, a collaboration between Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, has sold more than a million copies world-wide.
The ECM catalogue listings, now in excess of 700 releases, is a clear demonstration of how Eicher has followed his judgment and not yielded to commercial consideration. His latest release, for example, features Trygve Seim, a brilliant new saxophone talent from Norway. His debut, Different Rivers, is a rigorous blending of compositional forms and precisely focused improvisation, with an ensemble that includes accordion, French horn, saxophones, trumpet, cello, voice, bass and drums with some of Norway's brightest instrumental talents.
Seim's meticulously articulated low-key ardour is highly disciplined yet aesthetically beckoning, reconfiguring the traditional trumpet/sax ensemble with an imaginative sound palette. This creates ever-changing ensemble hues that put sound at the centre of musical events. "It is not in the way of American jazz, but is Scandinavian," says Eicher. "The musicians play a different blues, and it's not of urban America. They have been brought up in different surroundings with a different music tradition. They know isolation, and they know stillness, and they know tranquility because that is all around them."
Once again Eicher has come up with something different: confounding expectation, he is again opening doors to new musical horizons. "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux once said, `You wish to see, listen; hearing is a step towards vision.' That dialectic is something we have used as a leitmotif in our catalogue. For me it says everything."
Trygve Seim's Different Rivers is available on ECM 1595212
ECM's Irish distributor is Interactive, Alexandra House, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2. 6761523 (Phone) 6618562 (fax). email info@interactive-music.com