I once asked the ECM label founder Manfred Eicher if his cool production style might not benefit from being a little funkier. He turned on me with an expression of magisterial froideur. "If I'm doing a recording of lyrical solo piano with someone like Paul Bley, why the hell would I want it to be funky?"
Having chalked up multi-million-sellers with Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert and Officium, a meeting of vocal group the Hilliard Ensemble and Norwegian saxman Jan Garbarek, the Munich-based ECM has become an exemplar for what can be achieved by inspired individuals following their aesthetic impulses and ignoring the market's dictates.
A sometime double bass player who founded ECM as a jazz label in 1969, the 70-year-old Eicher chooses the artists, produces the records and devises the covers, creating a seductively austere conceptual package with a core following that has allowed the label to weather the music industry's travails far better than most.
Music from other parts of the world was part of the ECM vision from the outset, and the artists Eicher has championed have tended to be genre-bending mavericks such as Tunisian oud virtuoso Anouar Brahem, Argentinian bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi and Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou, whose new album Medea imagines the music of ancient Greece using the kind of modern folk instruments heard at village weddings.
Earthy, though, it certainly isn't. While the music was composed for a production of the tragedy at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus and recorded in Athens, there's a baleful Nordic starkness to the sound. The rasping flute, tingling dulcimer and ruminative cello phrases lead us through pieces that unfold like a succession of chilly and rather spooky rooms, the mood only occasionally lifted by a rapturous female chorus.
The ECM approach can be heard to more immediate effect on Kula Kulluk Yakisir Mi, live extemporisations by Iranian upright-fiddle player Kayhan Kalhor and Turkish lute master Erdal Erzincan. From the first few ominous notes the tension builds relentlessly as a handful of traditional phrases are put through exhilarating changes, the sense of space so palpable you feel you're on the stage.
Critics say Eicher's records are cold and humourless, yet at such times you feel the sense in his claim that he is pursuing "an ideal, chasing musical refinements that can possibly never be realised".
