Books & Poetry

Okay, so it’s not cheap, but this handsome 400-plus-page tome celebrating Manfred Eicher’s admirably independent music label could hardly shortchange on production values when ECM excels in recording quality, cover art, liner notes, etc. Not that the brand’s just about packaging: whether accompanying jazz, world music, classic or contemporary ‘serious music’ or even a Godard movie soundtrack (I do mean soundtrack, not score), the exquisite styling has for almost 40 years been aligned to work of real substance.

Together with shorter contributions from more than 100 musicians, 20 essays and interviews explore the ECM ethos, be it in European or American jazz, post-Soviet music, early Baroque, folk, experimental fare or any gloriously uncategorisable fusion thereof; design, sound engineering, film and photography and other non-musical aspects of the company’s activities are also covered. Some pieces are analytical or historical, others are anecdotal, philosophical, or jazzily oddball. The variety’s hardly surprising when subjects and contributors range from Jarrett, Garbarek, Metheny, Carla Bley and Evan Parker to Arvo Pärt, Elliott Carter, Gidon Kremer and Giya Kancheli; from Anouar Brahem, Kaylan Kalhor and Dino Saluzzi to Robert Wilson, Geoff Dyer, Theo Angelopoulos and the aforementioned Jean-Luc (with Anne-Marie Miéville, naturally).

Eicher is represented both by a rumination written by himself and in two interviews by the book’s editors (very able writers themselves); and that’s as it should be, since the producer’s sensibility, vision and methodology – an intriguing combination of unusually hands-on interest in each and every project with rare respect for his artists’ own need for creative freedom – pervade ECM’s output, just as they’re everywhere evident in the book it’s inspired. Eicher quotes Henry James (‘We work in the dark. We do what we can, we give what we have. The rest is the madness of art’) as a possible ECM credo, but a remark of his own is perhaps still more fitting: ‘I have never thought of any borders.’