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The average jazz listener—whoever that might be—may never give a thought to how his favorite musicians learned their art. There was a time, long past, when most professional jazz artists reached proficiency through on-the-job training. Music departments in institutions of higher education took decades to recognize jazz as a serious branch of music. Older jazz players who majored in music can tell you stories of being disciplined or, in extreme cases, thrown out of school for jamming in practice rooms. That changed. I haven’t done a survey, but my educated guess is that the majority of professional jazz musicians at work today studied in a college or university jazz program. One of the key agents of the change was Leon Breeden of North Texas State University. Breeden died yesterday. He was 88. Here’s the beginning of a 1979 Texas Monthly piece I wrote about him.

Fifteen or twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable for a major jazz leader to select key players from recent college graduates. But the quality of musicians on the college level has improved so dramatically in recent years that in the mid-seventies Woody Herman hired his entire rhythm section right out of North Texas State University in Denton. North Texas State’s lab band progam, under the direction of Leon Breeden, led the way in showing that properly trained and disciplined youngsters can produce superior music.
Jazz education has been a part of the NTSU music program for 32 years, and although other universities have occasionally produced impressive student bands over the past couple of decades, Breeden’s have been consistently noteworthy for their polish, unity and flair. His understanding of the requirements of jazz ensemble playing, and his ability to make his students understand them, have resulted in playing that has aroused envy in professional musicians.

To read all of that 31-year-old article, go here. For The Dallas Morning News obituary of Breeden, go here.
This video, posted today by an admirer, presents a summary of Breeden’s career and importance, with photographs and musical evidence of what he achieved. It begins with his own words.

Jessica Williams, Touch (Origin). It would have been difficult to imagine that Williams might exceed what she achieved in her 2009 solo concert recording The Art of the Piano. Yet, less than a year later she returned to Seattle’s Triple Door and gave this recital glowing with her customary pianistic dazzle and a nearly Brahmsian gravity leavened with wit. The album’s title implies more than the exquisite way she addresses the instrument’s keyboard and pedals—the pianist’s equivalent of tone. She demonstrates that aspect of her musicality with understated drama in the album’s first piece, “I Loves You Porgy.” Near the end, following a passage drenched in blues feeling, she releases a freshet of quiet 32nd notes at the very top of the keyboard where only the best pianos don’t sound tinny. The Triple Door’s Steinway D is silvery in its upper reaches. Williams’s control is so exacting that despite the speed with which the stream goes by, each tiny note has its own clarity, its own expressiveness. Contrasted with the solidity of the bass note pattern in her left hand, the effect is mesmerizing; sparkles of sunlight on clear water rushing over rocks. When the piece ends, the audience does something unusual in these days of exhibitionist stomping and whistling at jazz performances. It sits quietly for a full four seconds before someone starts to applaud.
No, the Williams touch arises from every aspect of her musicality and goes beyond technique into the rarified territory of recognizability. Listeners familiar with her are unlikely to need a CD cover or an announcement to know who is playing. It has to do with the way her left hand voices chords, the characteristic fillip she gives grace notes, the way she floats time without sacrificing swing, her infusion of blues feeling into material that has no formal connection to blues harmonies, her personalization of songs indelibly identified with others. Paying tribute, she takes ownership of Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” and John Coltrane’s “Wise One.” A transformer of standards, Williams enters the landscape of nostalgia with Johnny Green’s “I Cover the Waterfront” but manages to also make it an occasion for mild puns and a subtle bow toward Erroll Garner’s kind of swing.
Her own compositions enhance the reflective mood of the album. “Soldaji,” the title a variation on the Portuguese “saudade,” is as expressive of loss and longing as anything by Jobim, Bonfá or Villa Lobos. “Rosa Parks” is the waltz in the collection, with logical if unpredictable chord changes and a soft insistence that suggests its namesake. “Gail’s Song” is an after-midnight ballad that might seem patterned on a standard except for its unexpected chromaticisms, deceptively voiced seventh chords, and decorative flourishes that echo Ellington. “Simple Things” is just that, an open, uncomplicated melody in F with a set of changes that makes it easy for Williams to have fun. She quotes from or alludes to some of her favorite things, including “My Favorite Things,” “I’ll Never Be the Same,” “Along Came Bill,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Mairzy Doats” and Sophisticated Swing,” not to mention an assortment of bebop licks. I may have missed a few. The quotes are not the point. The point is that they are not tacked on but fit into the flow of her improvisation so that if you didn’t recognize them, it wouldn’t matter.
This level of accomplishment must be what Williams was anticipating when she said a few years ago that she felt she was on the verge of a step into “the next zone.” If so, the zone is an attractive place for her and her listeners. Williams seems to have worked through a period in which she was thoroughly musical—she has always been that—but not quite at peace with the world or herself. Touch has the air of a woman comfortable with her maturity and relaxed in her expanding musical universe.
People in the jazz community, particularly pianists in awe of Williams’s consistency, creativity and constant growth, often discuss why so many critics and the business side of jazz seem deaf to her brilliance. Whatever the reasons, they must be sociological, political or cultural. They cannot be musical, not with her decades of development into an artist who can sit at a piano in a night club and create a masterpiece like Touch.

Dana Hall, Into The Light (Origin). Drummers who flaunt their technique can be enemies of music when their busyness becomes the center-ring distraction in a band. Dana Hall is a busy drummer, but in his case that’s a compliment. He accompanies with waves of rhythmic patterns surging and swelling behind, under and around soloists. This 40-year-old Chicagoan—debuting here as a leader—manages to amalgamate his virtuosity so that he melds into the flow of the soloists’ improvisations. That places him in a line of aggressive but accommodating drummers that goes back at least as far Sid Catlett and includes Max Roach, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and, more recently, Jeff “Tain” Watts.
From the beginning of the album’s first piece, Herbie Hancock’s “I Have a Dream,” Hall dramatically demonstrates his mastery of what might be called integrational drumming. The dynamics of his pops, snaps, cymbal splashes and ingenious divisions of time rise and fall with the intensity of the performance as trumpeter Terell Stafford, saxophonist Tim Warfield, Jr. and pianist Bruce Barth solo. For all its vigor, there is also subtlety in Hall’s playing, and in the concepts in the album. Hall’s drumming transition from “Conversion Song” into “Orchids” is a case in point. It creates the effect of a two-part suite and sets up bassist Rodney Whitaker’s superb solo. The title tune is the shortest in the album and, with the exhilaration of its collective chance-taking, the freest. The longest, “Jabali,” combines harmonic freedom, in the Ornette Coleman sense, with traditional swing and a rare instance of silence from Hall while the horns sing his closing melody.
Stafford and Hall are mutual admirers, with cause, and sidemen in one another’s bands. Stafford reaffirms here that he is one of the most important trumpeters to emerge in the new century. Warfield, a swaggering tenor saxophonist, doubles on soprano and has fine moments on each horn. Barth, often type-cast as a mainstream post-bop pianist, demonstrates that he can go as far out as Hall, a former aerospace engineer. A member of the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hall is accomplished in composition and arranging. All of the music on the CD is his except for the Hancock piece, Warfield’s joyous “Tin Soldier and Whitaker’s “For Rockelle,” a ballad based on “My Funny Valentine.” Into The Light was released late in 2009. It took me a while to get around to it. I’m glad that I did.

In his few years, Oliver Nelson achieved major success as a composer and arranger in jazz and in the Hollywood studios. His first big band collection, Afro-American Sketches (1961), made it clear that he was an important new talent. His Blues And The Abstract Truth with an all-star septet that included Bill Evans, Freddie Hubbard and Eric Dolphy is one of the most significant jazz albums of the second half of the 20th century. A good saxophonist, Nelson blossomed as a writer. His inventiveness, productivity, adaptability and capacity to produce on schedule led him to a career composing for television and movies. He scored, among other programs, 1960s and ’70s hits including Ironside, Mr. Broadway and The Six Million Dollar Man. He became wealthy, but was leery of an essentially mercantile pursuit that he feared might sap his creativity. Phyl Garland wrote about Nelson’s concern in a November, 1968 article in Ebony magazine.

He fears that he might become a victim of his own success, for there is the constant lure of the even bigger money to be made by those who join “the club,” as that small group of openly commercial but highly solvent Hollywood composers call themselves. “Club” type success is difficult to shun, particularly when Oliver enjoys living as he does, though he has few spare hours to splash around in his own pool, and is equally proud of the home and 22-acre tract he has purchased for his parents on the outskirts of his hometown, St. Louis. He reluctantly admits, “I don’t see how I could give it all up,” but realizes that his expanding activities have left him little time in which to write music freely, to answer what he calls “this inner voice…something inside that just has to come out.”

To read all of the lengthy piece about Nelson, go here. Two years after the article appeared, Nelson was in Germany to conduct his arrangements played by an international ensemble called The Berlin Dream Band. This video from that concert gives a rare opportunity to hear Nelson speak and see him at work in his preferred milieu. The first trumpet soloist is the late Carmell Jones. I am unable to identify the other two. The trumpet section is: Milo Pavlovic (Yugoslavia), Ron Simmonds (Canada), Carmell Jones (USA), Manfred Stoppacher (Austria), Harry Samp (Germany).

Oliver Nelson managed to balance “this inner voice” with work in the studios, but for only a few years longer. He died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 43.

Jim Wilke, known worldwide for his Jazz After Hours satellite radio program, also runs a popular weekly broadcast featuring musicians from the Pacific Northwest. He sent this alert about the first program in a new series. It will present music from a major festival that ended last weekend.

Centrum Jazz Port Townsend Festival Big Band next on

Jazz Northwest

The All Star Festival Big Band is always one of the hits of the annual Jazz Port Townsend Festival. This year’s concert lived up to the tradition of mixing top Northwest resident musicians with visiting jazz stars and a sprinkling of guest artists and was conducted by John Clayton. Most of the artists are also members of the faculty for the week-long jazz workshop that precedes the Festival. The concert was recorded for broadcast and will air exclusively (and stream online) on 88.5 KPLU on Sunday, August 8 at 1 PM Pacific Daylight Time. John Clayton led the orchestra and featured in solo turns were trumpet player and vocalist Byron Stripling, composer/arranger Ellen Rowe, singer Saschal Vasandani and drummer Butch Miles and other soloists from the band.
Ingrid Jensen, Jay Thomas and Terell Stafford in a three- way trumpet chase with John Clayton conducting the Festival Band.(Jim Levitt photo)

(For the completists among you: [l to r]
Saxophones: Travis Raney, Alexey Nikolaev, Jeff Clayton, Mark Taylor, Bill Ramsay.
Trombones: Dan Marcus, Wycliffe Gordon, David Marriott, Greg Schroeder (hidden).
Trumpets: Ingrid Jensen, Brad Allison (seated), Jay Thomas, Andy Omdahl (seated), Terell Stafford.
Rhythm section (not seen here): Jon Hansen, piano, Dan Balmer, guitar, Doug Miller, bass, Butch Miles, drums. —DR)

This is the first in a series of concerts from Jazz Port Townsend which will air on Jazz Northwest, Sundays at 1 on 88.5, KPLU. The concerts will be heard at monthly intervals.
Jazz Northwest is recorded and produced by Jim Wilke exclusively for KPLU and kplu.org. A podcast of each program is available on the Monday following the airdate at kplu.org.

Okay, okay, it’s a plug. Rifftides plugs are strictly based on the merit of the plugees.

The alto saxophonist Lee Konitz’s inventiveness and boldness have seldom flagged. As his recent recordings demonstrate, he continues to embrace adventure and risk. If his repertoire is stocked with pieces that he revisits time and again—”All the Things You Are,” “I’ll Remember April,” “Body and Soul,” “Just Friends”—Konitz is the epitome of the jazz soloist who tries never to play anything the same way twice, never coasts on clichés, even his own.
As a listener who has been captivated by Konitz since first hearing his 1949 recordings with Lennie Tristano, I never fail to find him at least interesting. Often, he transmits a sense of challenge and discovery remarkable for an improvising musician in his ninth decade. I may wish that Konitz had retained the skipping lightness and whimsy that characterized his work in the 1950s and well into the ’60s. It may not be realistic, however, to think that as an artist deepened his tone and his intellect, youthful spirits would continue to dominate his work.
There is no better example from the latter part of that “early” period than Konitz’s 1961 Motion album with bassist Sonny Dallas and drummer Elvin Jones, and few better examples from the ’50s, at least on video, than this 1954 performance of “Subconscious-Lee” with his Tristano bandmate Warne Marsh. The rhythm section is pianist Billy Taylor, guitarist Mundell Lowe, bassist Eddie Safranski and drummer Ed Thigpen.

Tom Vitale of National Public Radio put together a report about Konitz that summarizes his career and his present approach. It includes comments from Konitz and bits of his current work. To hear the story, go here and click on “Listen Now.” At the end of the text are links to previous NPR pieces about Konitz.

Jazz listeners who derided the sing-along records and TV shows that made Mitch Miller rich and famous in the 1950s and ’60s tended to forgive him the shallowness of his pop pap because he played with Charlie Parker. Miller died over the weekend at the age of 99. See Matt Schudel’s excellent obituary in The Washington Post.
In addition to his sing-along extravaganzas, Miller produced recordings by singers as various as Johnny Mathis, Hank Williams, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra—during one of the low points of Sinatra’s career. Before his career as a pop producer and sing-along specialist, Miller was admired as one of classical music’s most accomplished oboists. He appeared in oboe interludes and obbligatos in Parker’s album with strings and in a few live appearances with Parker’s string ensemble. In this photograph from the 1949 recording session we see Miller with Parker, drummer Buddy Rich, bassist Ray Brown and violinists Max Hollander and Milt Lomask. In this case, Miller is playing English horn.

And here he is with Parker in the remarkable “Just Friends,” from the Charlie Parker With Strings album. Miller has the oboe interlude between Bird’s choruses.
Sing along with this.
(A version of this post that was up for a few hours contained factual errors that fellow blogger Alan Kurtz called to my attention. The errors are gone. Thanks, Alan.—DR)

If you live in New York City or are headed there this week, you’re in luck. Rebecca Kilgore is in town, sharing a gig at Feinstein’s with the tenor saxophonist Harry Allen and his quartet. I learned of her appearance by way of The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com, which has a New York Culture section that doesn’t show up in the national print edition. Will Friedwald wrote the piece about Kilgore. He underlines the rarity of her appearances in The Apple.

Once you do hear Ms. Kilgore, however, you’ll be hooked: With her opulent chops, lighter-than-air style, and, above all, her effortless rhythm, Ms. Kilgore is the living embodiment of the hippest singers of the big band era, like Maxine Sullivan, Mildred Bailey, and Helen Ward. Her partner in time for this three-night stand is saxophonist Harry Allen, a master of ballads and blues who plays so brilliantly behind singers because he essentially is one himself. Ms. Kilgore’s intonation has an instrumental perfection to it, while Mr. Allen’s tender tenor boasts a warmly human vocalized edge; together they should approach perfection.

True. All true. To read the whole thing and see a terrific performance photograph of Ms. Kilgore, go here. In case you missed the Rifftides review of her triumphant concert with her husband’s band at The Seasons earlier this year, go here.

Thanks to Rifftides reader Dave Lull for alerting us to a jazz blog that debuted in early July. Although its name, Tony Flood’s House Of Hard Bop, could hardly be more specific, in his first post Mr. Flood opened with a demurer:

Hard Bop: the Dominant, Not Sole, Focus Here.
I care a great deal about what came before it, and what came out of it, most of all the remarkable musicians who faced challenges (pardon the euphemism) posed by the British invasion of 1964. “Hard bop” is an abstraction, but if I manage to lead my visitor away from words about it and to the music itself, which my words might as easily dilute as illuminate, he or she will be able to put meat on the literary bones I offer.

That’s a good beginning. One of Mr. Flood’s early posts is a personalized piece about the little-known pianist Sadik Hakim, whom he knew. To read it, go here and scroll down to July 15.
When you come back (please do), you may care to go to this Rifftides archive piece, then this one, for additional reflections on hard bop.
Mr. Flood—welcome to the neighborhood.

The French jazz critic Alain Gerber is also a novelist, or vice versa. He published a book in 2007 that may be a biography, a novel, or both. Its title in French is Paul Desmond et le côté féminin du monde, or Paul Desmond and the Feminine Side of the World. That is the extent of my ability to translate from French to English, and I owe it to Google. I’m the guy who gets by in France for two weeks at a time with Excusez-moi de vous deranger. Here is the Googleized English version of the French publisher’s description of the book:

He loved burning cigarettes at both ends. He loved scotch dewars with a youthful zeal, and then go home to around the early morning, waking in the middle of the afternoon and groping her horn-rimmed spectacles, and contemplate his hangover in the mirror of the bathroom, with a sense of accomplishment. He liked to kill time with extreme gentleness. Dying without impatience. discuss the eye. Talking about literature, poetry, ballet, film, comedy. But, above all, he loved women. […] They were his smoke without fire. telling and music prodigy, this dissipation of shimmer, this splendid infertility.

As Desmond’s English language biographer and drinking companion, I now have one more reason to regret his no longer being among us. I would give about anything—let’s say a bottle of Dewars—to read that passage to him, looking up and pausing after “groping her horn-rimmed spectacles.” Paul infrequently laughed out loud. He was more given to knowing chuckles, but that line might have done the trick. The French website offers this passage from the book:

“All it was – a saxophonist, star or unloved, Don Juan, a man without a wife, a writer without literature, alcoholic, desperate, lonely, good guest, a nostalgic, casual, maker of epigrams and witticisms, amateur puns, storyteller, and many other things – all he was, he never was really “

To see it in Alain Gerber’s native tongue, go here.
For the English translation of the web page, go here. I can find no evidence that Paul Desmond et le côté féminin du monde exists in anything but French.
Skill in languages is unnecessary for the enjoyment of Desmond, Jim Hall, Gene Wright and Connie Kay playing Matt Dennis’s timeless ballad “Angel Eyes.” This is from one of Paul’s RCA quartet albums of the 1960s. Seldom mentioned in assessments of Desmond’s and Hall’s playing is their ability to find blues implications in non-blues pieces.

Jimmy Heath recently said he’s been hearing since he was a youngster that jazz is dying. The saxophonist and composer/arranger will be 84 in October. Joining him in discounting death rumors is a younger man, the veteran entrepreneur Todd Barkan, who runs the oddly named but vital Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, a bastion of jazz in New York City. Barkan is preparing a fall festival designed to help insure the music’s vitality by bringing together some of its wise elders with promising younger musicians. Pia Catton writes about the project in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“We are reaching a critical stage in jazz music because we’ve lost a lot of people in the last few years,” Mr. Barkan said. “Older artists teach a lot by example and the practice of jazz.”

To learn of Barkan’s plans for the festival and read all of the article, which includes an embedded video, go here.

Someone who identifies himself on YouTube as “liveacid” went to painstaking trouble to manufacture a video of Chet Baker and Paul Desmond playing “Autumn Leaves.” The music track is from Baker’s 1974 album She Was Too Good To Me. It was later reissued on the compilation Chet Baker & Paul Desmond Together. From disparate sources, the editor rounded up shots of Baker, Desmond, pianist Bob James, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Steve Gadd. You’ll hear Hubert Laws’ flute, but “liveacid” did not include shots of Laws.
The breaths Desmond and Baker take don’t match those in the music, although they often come uncannily close. Pay attention to what fingers and drumsticks are doing in relation to the notes and you’ll see the misses and near-misses. You never see the players together. The editor repeatedly recycles the same shots. Still, despite its flaws it’s a clever job of digital cut and paste. It is reason enough to listen again to players who, as the liner notes of that compilation remind us, were wonderful together.

Have a good weekend.

The Japanese have a longstanding love affair with jazz piano. Albums by jazz pianists sell consistently well in Japan. Leading pianists from around the world perform there in concerts and clubs. Indeed, the country has produced its own crops of world-class pianists, among them Toshiko Akiyoshi, Makoto Ozone, Kei Akagi, Junko Onishi and the current phenomenon Hiromi Uehara. A Japanese promoter organizes an annual tour called 100 Gold Fingers that features 10 prominent pianists in concert. The tour has included at one time or another Hank Jones, Roger Kellaway, Eddie Higgins, Jessica Williams, Junior Mance, Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes, Cedar Walton and Ray Bryant, among many others.
No one in Japan is more committed to jazz piano than Tetsuo Hara. He records horn players and singers, too, but his Venus Records catalog is packed with CDs by some of the music’s most prominent keyboard artists. Hara records many of them in New York under his supervision and that of the veteran producer Todd Barkan. His recordings have superior sound by first-rate engineers like Jim Anderson, David Darlington and Katherine Miller. For years, it was difficult and expensive for people outside Japan to acquire Venus records. Now, most of them are available in the US and elsewhere; at import prices, it’s true, but bargain offers show up on some web sites. Although original compositions occasionally materialize on Venus albums, Mr. Hara’s inclination is to have his artists record familiar music. In general, the results confirm that the song form offers endless possibilities, as even the famously iconoclastic saxophonist Archie Shepp demonstrates in his four Venus CDs.
Today’s topic, however, is pianists.
Roland Hanna, Après Un Reve (Venus). In this exquisite little recital, the pianist bases his improvisations on music by Schubert, Fauré, Borodin, Chopin, Mozart, Dvořák, Mahler and Anton Rubenstein. He recorded it less than two months before he died in November, 2002. Ron Carter’s bass lines and Grady Tate’s all-but-weightless drumming are perfect complements to Hanna, who reaches deep into the harmonic opportunites in pieces generations have loved for their melodies. Hanna’s clarity of conception and lightness of touch are beautifully captured in this flawlessly engineered recording. Among the pleasures here are his chord substitutions as he makes his stately way through Mozart’s indelible “Elvira Madigan” theme from the Op. 21 C Major Piano Concerto, the gravity of the trio’s treatment of the second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No 5 and—between those mostly solemn reflections—a Dvořák backbeat boogaloo on “Going Home” from The New World Symphony. This is a gem in Roland Hanna’s discography.
Eddie Higgins, If Dreams Come True (Venus). It is an indication of Higgins’s (1932-2009) popularity in Japan that the Venus catalog has 29 CDs under his name. Several of them, including this one from 2004, are trio or small band albums with bassist Jay Leonhart and drummer Joe Ascione. In accordance with the Hara dictum, all of the pieces but one are standards. That one, “Shinjuku Twilight,” is an attractive A-minor theme that stimulates Higgins and Leonhart to some of their best soloing in an album in which both are at the tops of their games. “Standards” doesn’t necessarily mean warhorses. “A Weekend in Havana” and “Into the Memory” are hardly overdone, and Higgins does them to a turn. It’s good to hear Higgins caress Xavier Cugat’s rarely performed ‘Nightingale,” convert “Days of Wine and Roses” into a “Killer Joe” soundalike and recall Django Reinhardt with a jaunty revival of “Minor Swing.” Alec Wilder’s “Moon and Sand” becomes a modified samba. The piece de resistance is “St. Louis Blues,” with a boogie woogie component that may not have been intended as tribute to Earl Hines but would surely have generated one of Hines’ thousand-watt smiles if he had heard it.
Stanley Cowell, Dancers In Love (Venus). Cowell recorded this in 1999 with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, young lions beginning to make their names. He had already established his own reputation among musicians but to this day remains unfamiliar even to many dedicated jazz listeners. In part, that is because Cowell has dedicated much of the latter part of his career to jazz education, most recently with tenure at Rutgers University. He is a complete pianist, capable not only of demonstrating the formidable technical aspects of Art Tatum but also of capturing the elusive subtleties and eccentricities of Thelonious Monk. In this album he employs his absolute command of the keyboard not in the service of display but of musical expression. Over the years, Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” has become a vehicle for speedsters. Cowell takes it at the pace of a leisurely walk, disclosing the lyricism concealed in its intriguing harmonies. In a brief exposition of Duke Ellington’s “Dancers in Love,” he gets inside Ellington’s whimsy. He laces the cowboy song “Ole Texas” and a South African folk song with musical values and plays the whey out of Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag,” complete with bebop moments that make perfect sense. Cowell includes two originals, a bittersweet ballad called “I Never Dreamed” and “St. Croix,” which sparkles with calypso verve. His inventiveness in Gershwin’s “But Not For Me” is dazzling. This rarity of an album, like Cowell himself, should be better known.

Manfred Eicher has been successful with his ECM label not by constantly taking the pulse of the public and the record industry but by recording music he likes. That is an oversimplification, but not much of one. In the British newspaper The Guardian, Richard Williams has a piece about Eicher and his 40 years at the helm of the company he founded. Near the top of the article, he writes:

To its many admirers, ECM stands for a certain meditative, introspective approach to playing and listening. Its albums – about a thousand of them to date – are recorded and packaged with a deliberate refinement, once upsetting to those who concluded that Eicher had somehow squeezed the vitality from the jazz he professed to love, contaminating it by an association with his north European sensibility.
That argument seems to have been won.

Williams goes on to make the case, in part with quotes like this from Eicher:

“For me it’s very good to bring the demands of written music – phrasing, intonation, dynamics – to improvisational recording, where the approach is looser and more spontaneous. And vice versa, to bring some of the spirit of an improvised music session into a recording of written music, to get some empathy into it, so that it doesn’t become an academic-circle record. I’m trying to make an exchange, to bring one to the other.”

To read the whole thing, go here.