ECM Releases

Marilyn Crispell/Anders Jormin: Memento (ECM 2867)

| Tyran Grillo

Marilyn Crispell
Anders Jormin
Memento

Marilyn Crispell piano
Anders Jormin double bass
Recorded July 2025
Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 20, 2026

Memento arrives with quiet poetry, the kind that settles into the human heart of its own volition. In this first duo encounter between Marilyn Crispell and Anders Jormin, collaboration feels secondary to recognition, as if two long-circling orbits have finally aligned. Both artists carry histories that run through the ECM tapestry, yet what unfolds here feels more essential than lineage or style.

The opening sequence of improvisations awakens the album with a fragile sense of recall. Each gesture conveys the hesitancy of memory surfacing, not fully formed, yet insistent. A tender gravity settles over these exchanges, one that avoids declaration and favors suggestion. Crispell’s piano hovers at the edge of articulation, tracing lines that seem both discovered and surrendered, while Jormin’s bass responds with near-instinctive sensitivity. Their interplay unfolds like a language stripped to its essence, where every note feels earned, released only when it can no longer remain unspoken. Even moments of lightness retain a delicate restraint, a shared understanding that silence is an equal partner in the unfolding.

As the album deepens, this sensitivity becomes its guiding principle, especially in its treatment of memory. The pieces shift and refract, less like fixed compositions than terrains revisited under changing skies. Jormin’s “Three Shades of a House” embodies this quiet transformation. Its dual incarnations feel like glimpses through different windows of the same interior. The “Morning” version carries a tentative warmth, while the “Evening” rendering withdraws into solitude, its contours softened by introspection. Time alters not only the surface of the music but its inner weight, revealing how experience reshapes even the most familiar forms.

The album also gestures outward, though always through an inward gaze. “The Beach at Newquay” evokes place through atmosphere rather than description, a coastline suggested in fragments of tone and texture. Jormin’s bass releases distant calls that dissolve before they can settle, while Crispell’s piano glides like shifting light across water. The scene feels steeped in night yet illuminated from within.

What binds Memento together is its understanding of relationships as living presences, shaped as much by absence as by proximity. Crispell’s compositions, especially “Song” and the title piece, carry a clarity that resists sentimentality while remaining deeply felt. Affection moves through these works with a measured grace, tempered by the knowledge that connection always harbors the answer to its own vanishing. Jormin responds with a tone that approaches the human voice. Together, they form a grammar of care that finds strength in vulnerability, itself a source of resonance.

By the time “Dragonfly” emerges, the album has settled into something less like a sequence and more like a state of being. Crispell’s elegy for Gary Peacock allows the past to move freely within the present. The closing moments feel like a gentle release, a soft shift in the air. What remains is something akin to a shadow that no longer belongs to an object. It suggests a world where presence is always in the process of becoming something else, where even disappearance holds authorship.

Mark Turner: Patternmaster (ECM 2835)

| Tyran Grillo

Mark Turner
Patternmaster

Mark Turner tenor saxophone
Jason Palmer trumpet
Joe Martin double bass
Jonathan Pinson drums
Recorded April 2024 at Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard and Christoph Stickel
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 13, 2026

Following in the footsteps of 2022’s Return from the Stars, which found saxophonist Mark Turner gazing past the horizon of earthly jazz into a more cosmic register, his quartet with trumpeter Jason Palmer, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Jonathan Pinson returns with the aptly titled Patternmaster. If its predecessor charted a voyage outward, this record feels like the mapping of constellations discovered along the way. Lines weave and bob with adroit precision while maintaining a pliant freedom that lets the occasional jab of surprise land with force. Turner and Palmer operate as simpatico melodic leads, their phrases joining and separating like a quasar whose pulse cannot be predicted but somehow feels inevitable. Turner has long been a paragon of control in tone, technical craft, and compositional balance. Yet something in these performances carries the gravity of accumulated time. The music speaks with an elder’s clarity without surrendering its curiosity. One hears not only mastery but also a widening orbit of possibility.

The album’s title reaches outward into literature through the first book of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist series, a saga in which telepaths form intricate networks of shared consciousness. Butler imagined communities linked by invisible threads of perception, individuals whose thoughts reverberate through an unseen lattice of awareness. Her fiction often asked difficult questions about power, responsibility, and the fragile architectures that bind societies together. Turner’s quartet mirrors that speculative vision through sound. Each musician senses the others before the note fully arrives, improvisation functioning as a kind of musical telepathy. Melodies propagate through the ensemble like signals traveling through Butler’s imagined psychic web. Turner also gestures toward Wayne Shorter, whose own compositions often seemed to arise from dimensions beyond surface-level perception. In that lineage, Patternmasterproposes jazz as a field of relational intelligence. Ideas migrate from instrument to instrument, forming configurations that only exist because several minds are listening at once.

The title track makes that premise audible from its opening measures. A buoyant groove sets the stage while the horns present their theme with geometric clarity, every interval placed like a star plotted on a navigational chart. The rhythm section hums beneath them with gravitational assurance. The piece casts the listener’s gaze skyward toward something outer-spatial, yet its deeper pull leads inward. The connection it suggests cannot be quantified in apparent magnitude or spectral analysis. It registers in a quieter register of experience, the realm where recognition occurs before language intervenes.

From there, the bass monologue that opens “Trece Ocho” arrives like a lone satellite sending its first transmissions home. Joe Martin traces thoughtful arcs through silence, as though recording data that must still be interpreted. The tune unfolds in stages of perception, moving gradually from solitary voice to collective emergence. Each solo alters the musical environment that follows. Turner’s improvisation resembles an elegant algorithm, cascading through possibilities with luminous logic. Palmer answers with lines that tighten the weave, bringing a sharper contour to the harmonic field. Just when the music appears to settle into contemplative quiet, it erupts in a radiant final flare. Martin’s arco passages slice across the ensemble grain with exquisite articulation, a supernova of sound that briefly illuminates every corner of the quartet’s shared cosmos.

“It Very Well May Be” ventures furthest into the unknown. The groove leans toward the future with persuasive momentum, as though propelled by engines still being invented. Pinson and Martin ignite the rhythmic atmosphere with an intensity that feels both grounded and volatile. Palmer’s trumpet thrives in that oxygen, stretching its phrases with expressive daring while Turner threads agile countercurrents through the harmonic stream. Martin’s solo cools the embers and tends the kindling anew. His dialogue with Pinson’s cymbals suggests two lungs breathing through a single body of rhythm. In the wake of such combustion, “Lehman’s Lair,” named for saxophonist Steve Lehman, relaxes the tempo slightly while preserving its inner electricity. The musicians exchange impulses with the ease of charged particles colliding inside an invisible chamber. Stardust seems to enter the room, settling gently across the architecture of the tune.

“The Happiest Man On Earth” reveals another dimension of the quartet’s sensitivity. Its slow burn unfolds with patient grace, motifs drifting into alignment like planets discovering a shared orbit. Turner and Palmer circle one another with remarkable courtesy. Each phrase opens space for the other to extend its wingspan. Nothing intrudes upon the song’s unfolding. What emerges instead is a profound sense of trust, a musical atmosphere where melody can breathe without hurry.

This mood prepares the way for “Supersister,” a composition that longtime listeners may recall from Turner’s 2009 Fly Trio recording Sky & Country. Here, the piece expands into a sprawling landscape exceeding 12 minutes, with ample terrain to explore. Martin and Pinson construct intricate tessellations that support the horns’ luminous harmonies. Pinson’s extended solo deserves special mention, proliferating as it does with a kind of microbial brilliance, rhythms multiplying and mutating before being gathered back into the bloodstream. The effect resembles a cellular organism discovering new forms of life within itself. Each section of the tune carries its own perspective, its own microcosm of meaning. By the end, those fragments cohere into something larger than the sum of their parts. Martin’s bass returns to cradle the central rhythmic flame, leaving traces of abstraction that gradually resolve into a calm and congruent landing.

The result of all this suggests that patterns govern more than melody or rhythm. They shape the ways minds encounter one another, the ways attention moves through time, the ways imagination stitches together distant points of experience. Perhaps that is the quiet lesson at play. The universe may be vast beyond comprehension, yet meaning arises wherever perception forms a network. A few listeners in a room. Four musicians in conversation. Vibrations in air that momentarily align. From such fleeting constellations, whole worlds become thinkable.

Soaring into a Cloudy Sky: The Köln Concert at 50

| Tyran Grillo

On December 12, 2025, ECM released a 50th anniversary edition of pianist Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert, returning one of the most unlikely landmarks in recorded music to the present age. Half a century after its first appearance in 1975, the recording remains the best-selling solo piano album in history and a resilient beacon within the ECM catalogue, an improvisation captured under circumstances so fragile that its survival feels almost miraculous. But the deeper significance of the reissue lies elsewhere. It invites listeners back to the site of a transformation. What once seemed like a fleeting document of a single evening now feels closer to a permanent warm front in the cultural atmosphere. The music continues to circulate through time, condensing into private revelations whenever someone lowers the needle or presses play.

The legend surrounding the performance is familiar. Jarrett arrived in Cologne exhausted from touring. The piano provided for the concert was smaller than expected and in poor condition, with weak bass notes and uneven action. The hour was late. But the constraints became an engine. Jarrett reshaped his approach in response to these limitations, leaning toward the middle register, carving rhythmic patterns that could carry the music forward without relying on the instrument’s wounded depths. What followed, then, was a sustained act of adaptation, a musician turning difficulty into propulsion. The result has since become one of the most widely heard recordings in jazz, classical crossover, and improvised music, though it belongs comfortably to none of those categories.

In a new essay for the edition, German journalist Thomas Steinfeld recalls how there was little to distinguish the concerts surrounding the famed Köln performance and that all of them were “an expression of a will toward aesthetic emancipation.” United under that humble, if not humbling, banner was Jarrett’s commitment to improvised-only concerts, which allowed for the fullness of nothingness to make itself heard in real time. Each evening began with an empty field and ended with a configuration that had not existed before the first note. And yet, what emerged in the confines of the Cologne Opera House on that fateful date of January 24, 1975 seemed to cut out a new eyehole in the mask of history through which a new perspective on what was achievable at the piano was revealed in a way that perhaps no musician has before or since.

Steinfeld is quick to caution us against the gravitational pull of myth. This concert was one night within a longer tour and within a longer life of music. To isolate it too completely risks freezing Jarrett in a single pose, as though the artist were merely the vessel for this one improbable event. In truth, the Köln performance was a turning point along a broader arc that led to the monumental Sun Bear Concerts, whose vast landscapes of improvisation would extend Jarrett’s language even further. What we hear in Cologne is therefore not a conclusion but a threshold, the moment when one door swings open and the wind of possibility pours through.

There is something timeless about this music precisely because it is so firmly entrenched in time, documented on tape but composed in air. The opening of Part I arrives already in motion, like a river glimpsed from a bridge rather than a spring discovered at its source. Phrases rise and fall with the tentative confidence of a bird learning the currents of the sky. The melody circles overhead, close enough that its shadow passes over us. Jarrett’s left hand begins with the quiet determination of a traveler testing unfamiliar ground. A rhythm forms beneath the surface, hesitant at first, then increasingly sure of its own footsteps.

Before long, the music finds a pulse that seems older than the instrument itself. The piano becomes a breathing creature. Harmonic light flickers across the surface while deeper currents move beneath. When the famous vamp emerges just after the seven-minute mark, it feels like a clearing in the forest where everything suddenly gathers.

Yet any sense of grandeur refuses to settle into monumentality. Jarrett dismantles the structure almost as soon as it rises, examining it from within, turning it gently in the light like an object whose inner workings remain mysterious. The music behaves as a living cell. We witness its movement, its expansion, its ability to replicate feeling from one listener to another. Its mechanisms remain hidden. The effect spreads nonetheless.

The expansive final passage of Part I, with its thick block chords and surging textures, greets the listener not as a goodbye but as a hello.

Part IIa begins with a different temperament. What began as an aerial survey of the imagination now feels grounded in the body. A rhythmic pattern settles in with irresistible buoyancy. One hears the echo of gospel, the sway of folk dance, the bright elasticity of American vernacular music filtering through Jarrett’s internal vocabulary. The audience’s energy becomes part of the current. The music dances, stumbles briefly into contemplation, then rises again with renewed vitality.

This trajectory feels inevitable, as though following a path that had always existed beneath the floorboards of the hall. The music quiets into reflection before lifting itself once more with a blues-tinged warmth. Jarrett’s playing here carries the sensation of a traveler pausing beside a river before continuing onward.

Part IIb deepens the inward pull. The left hand coils into a spiraling figure that suggests a single direction of travel. Not outward but inward. Each repetition tightens the circle until the music finds an opening at its center. From there it rises into a fierce, sunlit expanse. The harmony burns with an almost desert brightness. One senses the pianist squinting into that light, moving forward despite the glare.

Such bravery animates the entire performance. Improvisation always contains the possibility of failure. Here that risk becomes the music’s secret fuel, as each phrase steps onto uncertain ground and finds footing just in time.

Part IIc arrives like a quiet epilogue whispered after the main story has ended. Its intimacy carries a gentle radiance. The closing gestures resemble a warm hand on the shoulder, a kiss on the cheek of a wanderer about to continue down the road. What remains is a small bundle of warmth carried forward into whatever lies ahead.

It’s easy to forget that Jarrett’s performance began just before midnight, after the opera audience had already departed and the city had slipped into a quieter rhythm. Jarrett stepped onto the stage at precisely that hour when the imagination becomes receptive to rarer signals. Perhaps this is why the music radiates with such unusual clarity. Under those conditions, suspended between today and tomorrow, even the smallest musical gesture appeared luminous.

All of which leads back to the peculiar solitude at the center of the recording. A lone pianist sits before a flawed instrument and invents an entire landscape from nothing. No bandmates share the burden. No written score provides direction. The artist listens to the room, to the objects at his disposal, to the faint murmurs of possibility that hover just beyond hearing. Music emerges like mist from a valley floor.

As is evident from my first attempt to describe this music in mere human language, the recording eludes definitive characterization. Words are the cloudy sky into which it has soared over the years. However, what language fails to capture finds perfect expression in sound. The piano speaks with a fluency that criticism can only admire from a distance.

Vincent Courtois/Robin Fincker/Daniel Erdmann: Lines for Lions (RJAL 397051)

| Tyran Grillo

Vincent Courtois cello
Daniel Erdmann tenor saxophone
Robin Fincker clarinet and tenor saxophone
Recorded, mixed, and mastered at La Buissonne Studios, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded November 25-26 and mixed December 2024 by Gérard de Haro
Mastering at La Buissonne Mastering Studio by Nicolas Baillard
Release date: November 7, 2025

Cellist Vincent Courtois returns in the company of tenor saxophonists Daniel Erdmann and Robin Fincker, forming a trio that feels at once improbable and inevitable. Three voices that might easily collide instead interweave, tracing bright arcs through open air. The instrumentation alone promises unusual geometry. Two reeds converse above the dark grain of cello, a chamber ensemble with the pulse of jazz and the curiosity of explorers who have misplaced their compass on purpose.

The album’s title gestures toward the tune Gerry Mulligan wrote in 1952 as a tribute to Jimmy Lyons, a figure closely tied to the legacy of the Monterey Jazz Festival. That piece eventually became a touchstone of West Coast jazz, known for its luminous melodic contour and breezy contrapuntal motion. Those qualities hover like a distant ancestor throughout this recording. The trio does not imitate that tradition. Instead, they treat it as a horizon, a place toward which melodic clarity travels even while the music wanders through stranger terrain.

The group thrives on the friction of difference. Erdmann’s tenor carries a weathered edge, a tone where breath scratches against metal and every note seems carved from bark. Fincker offers a contrasting ease, especially when he turns to clarinet and lets its rounded voice float through the ensemble like a ribbon of smoke. Courtois stands at the center of this triangulation. His cello provides gravity, yet it refuses to remain merely foundational. At one moment it functions as bass, grounding the harmony with muscular pizzicato. At another it becomes a singer, bow drawing long shadows across the musical landscape. Through this constant transformation the trio achieves a peculiar equilibrium. The music feels airborne while remaining tethered to a deep structural spine. We can see all of these qualities reflected in their writing, which is fairly well distributed throughout the set.

Vincent Courtois: Architectures of Motion

Courtois composes as someone who thinks orchestrally even within the tight confines of a trio. His pieces often hinge on physical movement. Lines stretch, recoil, then leap again as if guided by invisible pulleys.

“Alone in Fast Lane” opens the album with an immediate surge of energy. The two tenors ignite like twin flares, each tracing its own spiraling path while the cello pulses beneath them with restless purpose. Courtois’s pizzicato acts as both skeleton and engine. The sound possesses a remarkable clarity. One hears the music’s anatomy in real time. Nerves spark through the reeds while the cello functions as spinal cord, transmitting impulses that set the whole organism in motion. The result is a texture both taut and exuberant, a kind of high velocity counterpoint that never loses its center.

“Seven Lines for Old Mediums” inhabits a different climate. The music becomes pointillistic, almost painterly. Notes appear like small constellations rather than extended phrases. Courtois allows silence to speak with unusual authority. Each gesture hangs in the air for a moment before dissolving, inviting the listener to lean closer. The piece suggests a quiet meditation on the past, not through nostalgia but through delicate fragments that recall older languages without repeating them.

“Adios Body (Hello Soul)” carries a melody built on a gentle octave leap, a motif that first arrives with lullaby tenderness. Gradually the texture thickens. The tenors begin to growl and circle each other in animated debate while the cello intervenes with calm authority, a mediator guiding two spirited interlocutors toward uneasy harmony. What begins in repose evolves into something almost theatrical. The music sheds its skin and reveals a more restless spirit beneath.

Daniel Erdmann: Conversations with a Crooked Smile

Erdmann’s writing introduces a playful angularity. His pieces often feel conversational, as though the ensemble has stumbled into a lively discussion at a café where every participant insists on finishing the other’s sentences.

“Mulholland Coffee Break” evokes exactly that sort of moment. The tune unfolds with relaxed swagger, a melody that seems to lean back in its chair while still maintaining a sly sense of rhythm. Courtois takes full advantage of the mood. His improvisation dives into unexpected harmonic corners, bow and fingers shifting roles with effortless agility. When Fincker’s clarinet arrives, it pours a warm gloss over the scene, thick with ease. One can almost imagine sunlight slanting through a window onto a cluttered tabletop of cups and scribbled notes.

“Finally Giovanni” thrives on whimsy. The two tenors chatter above Courtois’s buoyant pizzicato, their lines hopping and sidestepping like dancers improvising steps across a wooden floor. The tune’s charm lies in its elasticity. Themes stretch then snap back into place with mischievous delight. What might have been merely jaunty becomes something richer through the trio’s shared instinct for balance. Humor and precision coexist without strain.

Robin Fincker: Blues Through a Kaleidoscope

Fincker’s contributions bring a blues sensibility filtered through an exploratory imagination. His pieces often begin in recognizable territory before opening unexpected doors.

“There and Then” highlights the clarinet’s expressive warmth. A call and response emerges between it, tenor, and cello, each voice stepping forward then retreating into the weave. The blues inflection runs deep but never feels conventional. Courtois again proves a formidable improviser, his cello singing with both grit and tenderness.

“Lion’s Den” returns the trio to a denser thicket of interaction. A hint of bop flickers through the rhythmic undergrowth, yet the structure refuses to settle into predictable grooves. At the center, Courtois delivers a remarkable solo passage, a monologue that seems to narrate its own unfolding. Each phrase arrives with quiet agency, like a thought discovering its own meaning while being spoken.

“Hobo Clown” closes the album with a buoyant sense of motion. Playfulness becomes the guiding principle. The ensemble glides through shifting textures fluidly, revealing the full breadth of its dynamic and technical range. The music smiles without losing its intelligence. Every gesture feels alive to possibility.

In this sense the trio suggests a quiet philosophical lesson. Music does not merely express individuality. It also reveals how individuality expands when placed in conversation. Perhaps creativity resembles a kind of listening. One waits for another presence to enter the room, uncertain what it will change, curious about the space that will appear between the sounds. In that small interval something unexpected begins to breathe.

Julia Hülsmann Octet: While I Was Away (ECM 2869)

| Tyran Grillo

Julia Hülsmann Octet
While I Was Away

Aline Frazão vocals
Live Maria Roggen vocals
Michael Schiefel vocals
Héloïse Lefebvre violin
Susanne Paul violoncello
Julia Hülsmann piano
Eva Kruse double bass
Eva Klesse drums
Recorded September 2023
Hansa Studio, Berlin
Engineer: Nanni Johansson
Cover design: Sascha Kleis
An ECM Production

Following a lineage of quartet formations, including 2025’s Under The Surface, Julia Hülsmann now opens the doors wide and lets the air rush in. With bassist Eva Kruse and drummer Eva Klesse anchoring the pulse, and the strings of violinist Héloïse Lefebvre and cellist Susanne Paul adding tensile grace, Hülsmann’s piano becomes both compass and hearth. The true masterstroke, however, is the inclusion of three voices, each bearing a distinct history and hue. Aline Frazão, Live Maria Roggen, and Michael Schiefel do not merely sing atop the arrangements. They inhabit them, converse with them, and occasionally conspire against them, for the greater good of surprise.

The album begins with an invocation. “Coisário De Imagens,” drawn from the songwriting partnership of Rosanna & Zélia, brings warmth and motion. This is music that knows how to smile without grinning. Brushed drums sway, the strings shimmer with purpose, and Aline Frazão’s voice carries the tune with organic ease. The groove settles into the body quickly, yet it never stagnates. As voices pull back, cello and piano exchange signatures like old friends swapping secrets, revealing the song’s interior logic with a quiet confidence. Thus, the listener is ushered into a world whose colors feel freshly mixed.

Frazão remains a guiding presence on two Hülsmann settings, each offering a turn of the emotional prism. “Sleep,” based on Emily Dickinson’s meditation on rest and repose, dims the lights and invites reflection. Day and night are no longer opposites here but gradients, each shade carrying its own emotional charge. The ensemble responds with restraint and intent, carving space for a bass solo that speaks with an unguarded eloquence. Hülsmann follows, her piano widening the horizon, patient yet searching, as though mapping the distance between thought and feeling. “Hora Azul,” with lyrics by Frazão herself, deepens the inward gaze. This is a song of attention, of moments caught before they slip through the cracks. A steady piano figure and gently strained strings hold the listener in place, ensuring that the insight offered does not vanish with the final chord.

Michael Schiefel arrives like a flash of theatrical lighting. On Ani DiFranco’s “Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up,” he revives the song from its 90s origins and gives it a new passport. Familiar contours remain, but the emotional terrain has shifted. Schiefel’s voice leans into vulnerability and abrasion in equal measure, allowing feeling to fray at the edges. A violin solo spices the mix, proving that nostalgia need not be stale. Hülsmann’s setting of “You Come Back” (with words by Margaret Atwood) sharpens the focus further. A geometric vamp populates the dance floor, and Schiefel’s diction slices cleanly through expectation, revealing scenes of emotional negotiation and unsettled bonds as energy accumulates. On “Iskele,” Schiefel contributes his own composition, rich with understated drama and a quiet electric charge. Morning and night coexist here, possibility balanced against reflection. His presence recalls the particular sort of art song and theatrical jazz that distinguishes Michael Mantler’s work, lending the album an added layer of dramaturgy.

Live Maria Roggen brings a Scandinavian clarity and a gift for storytelling that feels both intimate and expansive. “Felicia’s Song” unfolds like a memory allowed to speak for itself, uncorrected and unpolished. The instrumental center glows with Hülsmann’s melodic assurance, her piano both narrator and witness. “Moonfish Dance” lifts the tempo, introduced by playful pizzicato that clears the stage for Roggen’s imagery. There is a gentle tilt toward the surreal, a reminder that wonder thrives when routine loosens its grip. On “Walkside,” Roggen’s lyrics meet the bandleader’s music in a tender alliance. The tune rocks with a soft inevitability, carrying reflections on time, travel, and promises bent but not broken. Loss and repair intermingle, and the song trusts the listener to hold both in equal measure.

The album’s heartbeat arrives with “TicToc,” Hülsmann’s inspired setting of E. E. Cummings. Here, whimsy becomes discipline. Multiple voices articulate a spoken refrain with crystalline precision, honoring Cummings’s playful defiance of linguistic order.

By the time the final notes fade, the scope of the project comes fully into view. This is not simply a collection of songs but a carefully plotted journey, one that treats collaboration as a way of life rather than logistics. Hülsmann has assembled a community of voices and instruments that dialogue and dream together. The album listens as much as it speaks, and in doing so, it achieves a rare sense of scale. It feels lived in, thought through, and generously offered. What lingers is not just melody or craft, but the sense of having traveled somewhere expansive, a place where time, language, and sound conspire to remind us how large music can be when it refuses to stay in its lane.

Björn Meyer: Convergence (ECM 2844)

| Tyran Grillo

Björn Meyer
Convergence

Björn Meyer 6-string electric bass
Recorded September 2024
Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Engineer: Michael Hinreiner
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher

In the wake of 2017’s Provenance, Björn Meyer widens his territorial reach on the six-string electric bass with a second solo album that feels less concerned with claiming ground than with listening for its contours. His ever-deepening attunement to space and the forms that allow it to exist becomes the true subject here, and his skills are offered not as a display of mastery but as the slow emergence of a language still discovering its grammar. What might initially register as post-production illusion reveals itself, upon closer attention, to be articulated in real time through a deft choreography of live effects. Magnets prepare the instrument for unfamiliar conversations, finger tapping redraws its internal architecture, and entire washes of sound are permitted to overtake the listener in search of calm.

The album opens with its title track, setting a narrative in motion while refusing to pin it down. Each encounter reshapes the story, rearranging its implications without altering its essence. A fuzzy tone carries a gentle spirit within it, one that moves the way sediment drifts and resettles after a glass of wine has been swirled. Notes surface in reverse order, establishing a tonal context in which the debris of this slow-motion tornado can be articulated through pointillism. The resulting shape and flavor recall Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, though here the patterning feels provisional, animated by a restless urge to stray just as readily as it returns. Deeper strums and higher callings exchange roles, and the sky above the music darkens by degrees, one shade at a time.

As the climate of “Hiver” briefly brightens the scene, it emits a particular quality of light, the muted radiance that arrives under an overcast sky on the verge of snowfall. In this moment, it becomes clear that the narrative forming across the album is inward-facing. This is not the documentation of a journey so much as the journey undertaken by the one who documents. When the echoing bird calls of “Drift” begin to tug at the soul, they do not ask for permission. Direction is accepted without resistance, and the listener seeps further into the flow of time, less a passenger than a dissolving witness. “Gravity” resists the comfort of arrival altogether, suspending any promise of destination in favor of an elliptical song that bends back on itself. Meyer’s guitaristic approach draws a rose’s worth of texture and fragrance from the bass, unfolding petal by petal until only the stem remains. In “Motion,” it becomes a receiver tuned to a distant transmission. Subtle glitches and pulses trace the heartbeat of another time, and when that signal falls silent, only an echo remains to confirm it ever existed.

With “On Hope,” fluttering wings and a tactile fuselage lend lift to the album’s vessel, suggesting ascent without insisting upon it. Just as the cusp seems within reach, a malfunction intervenes, pulling everything back into the improvisational clang and hum of “Rewired.” The interruption does not feel punitive but necessary, a reminder that flight depends on friction as much as flow. When the circuitry is restored and life resumes its forward momentum, “Magnétique” extends the promise of repair. Its circular motifs and palpable sense of contact arrive as a blessing to worn ears, sound reconnecting with touch. That promise finds its fulfillment in “Nesodden,” which lowers itself not into sleep but into a state of awakening, discovering tenderness in the act of becoming and allowing that discovery to stand on its own.

This music reaches us only after its initial blaze has already passed, its transient glory having dispersed into silence somewhere beyond our reach. What remains is not absence but residue, an ember glow that warms the present without explaining itself. To listen is to accept that distance, to recognize that meaning does not diminish as it travels, and to sit quietly with the feeling that something vast has chosen, briefly and generously, to make itself known.

Craig Taborn/Tomeka Reid/Ches Smith: Dream Archives (ECM 2833)

| Tyran Grillo

Craig Taborn
Tomeka Reid
Ches Smith
Dream Archives

Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, electronics
Tomeka Reid violoncello
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone, percussion, electronics
Recorded January 2024
Firehouse 12, New Haven
Engineer: Nick Lloyd
Mixed by Craig Taborn, Manfred Eicher, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Bavaria Musikstudios, München, July 2025
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: January 16, 2026

After beguiling audiences during their 2025 German tour in anticipation of the album at hand, pianist Craig Taborn, cellist Tomeka Reid, and percussionist Ches Smith align their trio for ECM’s first release of 2026. The title, Dream Archives, frames the music in the most charming of contradictions. Does it propose a vault where dreams can be stored, catalogued, and retrieved at will, filed away under emotional subject headings? Or does it imply that dreams themselves function as archives, containing versions of ourselves we would never dare to perform while awake? The answer seems to flicker between both states, never settling, always indexing something just out of reach.
 
The opening lines of “Coordinates For The Absent” lean toward the former interpretation through their careful laying down of intent. Subtle electronic signals hang in the air, suspended as if awaiting authorization, and the piece offers itself as a puzzle box of possibility, one that opens only when the correct sequence of ambient gestures is entered. Each removal reveals another chamber until a nexus of musicianship appears that feels parthenogenetic. What unfolds is a system waking up, blinking itself into awareness.
 
From this tender pile of ashes rises “Feeding Maps To The Fire,” a phoenix song rendered with turn-on-a-dime precision and lightning-fast cognition. Reid circles the square, squaring the circle even, granting Taborn and Smith a territory they can claim equally with hands and feet. Her transitions from declaration to sublimation arrive with uncanny grace, functioning as a single conductive wire of intention that transmits thought across the studio in real time. Direction is fed directly into combustion here, and nothing burns without learning something new about its own heat.
 
“Dream Archive” opens with Smith on vibraphone doubling Taborn while Reid recalibrates the internal circuitry with a quiet furiosity that hums beneath the surface. Some of the session’s most intimate connections are forged in this space. An intelligent system comes online, discovering its cellular reality one line of musical code at a time. Still, the music never forgets the hand that writes the algorithm. There is a constant searching for connections that only breath, skin, and intention can provide. Motifs bend themselves into a twisted ballad before being pushed off a cliff, tumbling across jagged terrain, landing improbably intact, scuffed but smiling.
 
“Enchant” turns the night sky inside out and offers it as a writable surface, a palimpsest of the heart rendered in constellation and groove. Reid’s ostinato summons further digital traces, as though the hairs of her bow were the threads to which these signals cling, pulled magnetically toward a pulse that knows how to moonwalk away from expectation.
 
Set within this sea of Taborn originals are pieces by two of his guiding lights. Geri Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances” blossoms with the utmost delicacy, unfolding as a textile woven from shadow and intention. It searches for illumination in Taborn’s pianism and finds it as Reid and Smith combine their energies into ground, horizon, and sky. A stomping denouement introduces phenomenally geometric trio work, Reid on pizzicato assuming the role of bassist while Smith’s drumming speaks in joyful, articulated angles. The music smiles openly here, happiness not hinted at but announced, stamped, and joyfully notarized.
 
Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” continues that spirit of play, revealing a compositional singularity in which Taborn clearly recognizes a kindred mind. Its angular melody opens the door to some of the trio’s most delicately adventurous exchanges. The tune carries a faint echo of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” refracted through beat poetry, stripped of words, and filtered back into breath and wood and skin. Smith’s use of gong and timpani lends a ceremonial grandeur that never tips into pretension, offering Reid a tender surface upon which to draw her confident, decisive lines.
 
Ultimately, the dreamlike quality of Dream Archives does not arise from its unpredictability, nor from the way it renders the surreal inevitable. It emerges instead from the album’s theatrical intelligence. These performances understand that dreaming is an act, one that requires commitment, timing, and a willingness to forget oneself mid-gesture. The trio performs with the concentration of method actors who never break character because the character is the moment itself. In doing so, they blur the line between performer and listener, pulling us into their private syntax of meaning.
 
By the album’s close, the archive no longer feels like a place of storage but a living institution, one that rewrites itself each time it is entered. The dreams here are not preserved so much as rehearsed, practiced until they become fluent. When the final notes fade, it feels less as though the music has ended than as though we have woken up holding fragments we cannot fully explain. These are the kinds of dreams that follow you into daylight, that annotate your memory without permission, that insist on being remembered even as they refuse full recall. In that sense, we are reminded of how to keep dreaming with our eyes open, filing experience under wonder, and leaving the cabinet unlocked.

Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM

| Tyran Grillo

Horizons Touched

It’s all our music.
–Robert Frost, “The Self-Seeker”

I. A Living Archive

Few record labels compel us to approach them in any way other than chronologically. ECM is one of them. Its catalogue does not merely document music made; it charts ways of listening learned, unlearned, and learned again. Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM arrives, then, not as a monument erected after the fact but as an attempt to take measure of a phenomenon still in motion, to listen back without closing the ear to what has yet to sound.

The importance of this book, devotedly published by Granta Books in 2007, lies precisely here. Rather than offering a definitive account of ECM, it gathers voices, memories, and reflections in a way that mirrors the label’s own refusal of finality. It does not summarize so much as resonate. In doing so, it becomes something rarer than an institutional history: a field of attentiveness, an act of collective listening directed both backward and forward. What is preserved is sensibility over consensus.

In his introduction, Steve Lake rightly calls ECM a “work-in-progress.” Indeed, ECM is not a repository of completed statements but a living archive in which the contributions of everyone who makes it a reality function as vital organs within a larger, thriving body. The questions posed throughout the book are as follows: How does one listen to a past that refuses to settle into style, school, or doctrine? How does one write about music that has always positioned itself slightly ahead of its own reception?

Before ECM and its leadership under bassist-turned-producer Manfred Eicher, no one had thought of space in jazz in quite the same way. Through Eicher’s early work with engineers Martin Wieland and Jan Erik Kongshaug, the recording studio itself emerged as an unspoken player, an active participant rather than a neutral container. Light entered sound. Atmosphere became structural. Silence was no longer an absence but a condition. Yet even this often-cited “ECM sound” resists fixation, not because it lacks identity but because it repels reduction.

Given that so many locations, musicians, and traditions have passed through the label, to distill its ethos into a single style would be to flatten precisely what has given it life. As Eicher admitted in a 1999 interview, “All that can be really said about the ‘ECM sound’ at this point is that the sound that you hear is the sound that we like.” From this deceptively modest admission unfolds an expansive reality. What began as a jazz imprint grew far beyond the conventions of genre, making room for folk music, film soundtracks, electro-acoustic alchemy, and, with ECM New Series, classical streams grafted into the same current. Even there, the borders remain porous: Jan Garbarek improvising alongside the Hilliard Ensemble; curated excerpts from a Heiner Goebbels sound installation; Keith Jarrett playing Bach’s French Suites on harpsichord.

Horizons Touched matters because it understands this permeability not as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be honored. Enabled by over 100 contributors, the book presents itself as an “oral history,” though the term hardly captures its scope. What emerges instead is a polyphonic portrait of a label that has always worked obliquely through implication, atmosphere, and trust. Like the music it documents, the book does not insist. It invites. And in doing so, it affirms ECM as a listening practice still unfolding.

II. Seeing as Listening

It is telling that, following Lake’s opening statement, the essays do not begin with Eicher but with “Our Music: Synopsis for a Film” by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. The filmmakers speak of seeing as listening, and few in their art would know better. This inversion of sensory hierarchy sets the tone for what follows.

Eicher’s essay, “The Periphery and the Centre,” originally delivered as a speech upon receiving the Kultureller Ehrenpreis of the City of Munich in 2005, continues this meditation on margins and essence. He speaks of the ECM office in Munich, located in what he calls “a no man’s land of industrial culture” at the periphery of things. Having been there myself, I can attest to its uncanny contradiction of placelessness and situatedness. Yet Eicher cautions against romanticizing such things: “We must never settle too comfortably at the periphery—the margin should only be a source, a spot from which to grasp the essence of the centre.”

His reflections braid together formative years in music school and the cinema, early encounters with Godard and others yielding a profound understanding of the overlaps between ears and eyes. For Eicher, atmosphere is not decorative but catalytic. “The atmosphere produced at a recording session,” he writes, “should be inimitable and awaken the desire to make changes or, where necessary, to improve and perfect.”

III. Redefining Tradition: European and Northern Voices

John Fordham’s “ECM and European Jazz” traces how figures like Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber became pioneers not by breaking with tradition but by redefining it as personally as possible. Weber’s admonition to his band—“you can play anything, as long as it doesn’t sound like jazz”—was a refusal of complacency. As Americans like Keith Jarrett, Bill Frisell, and Pat Metheny entered the fold and collaborated with European musicians, the sound expanded further. British artists such as Norma Winstone and John Taylor, alongside Kenny Wheeler in the influential Azimuth trio (with Ralph Towner welcomed into the circle), contributed to this widening field. Saxophonists John Surman—particularly in his solo recordings—and Evan Parker, with his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, ensured that the threat of typecasting never fully took hold.

On the mainland, artists like Louis Sclavis, Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stańko, and Miroslav Vitouš laid the groundwork for a new canon. And then there are the Scandinavians, whose presence Michael Tucker explores in “Northbound: ECM and ‘The Idea of North.’” What Tucker calls “a multi-hued Northern aura” begins with Afric Pepperbird, Garbarek’s historic recording with Terje Rypdal, Arild Andersen, and Jon Christensen. Yet this “North” is less a geographic persuasion than an idea taking shape in those who inhabit it or yearn toward it.

To my ears, few albums embody this sensibility more adroitly than Rypdal’s If Mountains Could Sing. But the Northern idea is not all cool washes and snowbound stillness. There is also unrest and existential fervor, as in the shamanic charge of Garbarek’s Visible World, which, despite its cool sheen, is rich with colorful flame. Even in the gentler worlds of Tord Gustavsen and Mathias Eick, there is a nomadism that never feels quite settled in its skin.

IV. Liminal Spaces and Less is More

This sense of in-betweenness finds articulate expression in Ivan Moody’s 2004 conversation with Jan Garbarek, “On Parallel Lines.” Garbarek speaks candidly about the difficulty critics have in placing his music. Jazz and classical camps alike often seem unsure how to approach it, leaving it to resound in a liminal space. “I consider myself extremely lucky,” Garbarek says, “because ECM already has a given audience, and they don’t really think of it as jazz or classical: it’s just a certain approach.”

Their dialogue ranges across questions of collaboration with musicians from other traditions, converging on a shared belief that constraints can be the most liberating conditions for creation. “I only seem to have dreams when I’m awake,” Garbarek remarks, a line that feels like an unofficial ECM motto.

V. New Series: Shadows, Voices, and Reinvention

The ECM New Series emerges throughout the book not as an offshoot but as an intensification of the label’s core ethos. John Potter’s “Early Music Discoveries and Experiments” marvels at Eicher’s uncanny ability to bring together musicians, ideas, and inspirations no one else would think to combine—most famously in Officium, but also in the Dowland Project.

Helen Wallace’s “Musicians of the New Series” observes that “the musicians who make ECM recordings are shadowy presences.” (My own early encounters with the New Series included Paul Giger’s Chartres. I remember trying to imagine what he looked like, how he moved while playing. When a clearer photograph finally appeared on Schattenwelt, it felt like seeing, through time, a mythical figure brought briefly into focus.) Wallace also notes the lack of musician biographies in the CD booklets, emphasizing that these recordings arise not from contracts but from shared visions and relationships with living composers illuminated by deeply human interpretations, resting in a nest of empathy.

Peter Rüedi’s “Continuity in Change: The Metamorphoses of Keith Jarrett” goes on to frame genius as a state of constant reformation rather than a sustained pinnacle. Jarrett’s “many-sidedness,” of “supernatural proportions,” exemplifies this restlessness. Rüedi speaks of the hymnic quality shared by Jarrett’s music and ECM: an ember that glows with varying degrees of warmth, sometimes sparking fires that take on lives of their own beyond the hearth.

VI. Free Playing, American Roots, and the Canvas Without an Edge

Josef Woodard’s “ECM and US Jazz” reminds us that the label has always been “a source of cohesion” for American artists and a further corrective to simplistic notions of the “ECM sound.” The label’s genesis lay with Mal Waldron, and figures like the Art Ensemble of Chicago brought incendiary free-jazz energy into its orbit. Jack DeJohnette, Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Ralph Towner, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Peter Erskine, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Steve Swallow, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, and Charles Lloyd all testify to a lineage of hard-edged expressivity as much as lyric spaciousness.

In “The Free Matrix,” Steve Lake’s interview with Eicher, free playing again emerges as a foundational principle. Eicher recalls early encounters with Paul Bley and identifies a “special electricity” shared by artists as varied as Glenn Gould, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett—an ability to act as “an inspired catalyst whatever the context.” Music, Eicher says, is “a canvas without an edge.” He recounts the genesis of the label’s name, inspired by Werner Goldschmidt’s Wergo series and Stockhausen’s From the Seven Days, leading him to imagine loosening borders through the idea of an “edition” (borrowed from the world of visual art) of contemporality. Thus, Edition of Contemporary Music was born. He likens the label to a sea: “A continuous movement of undercurrents and unexpected drifts… But sometimes the sea is tranquil, and stays tranquil.”

Keith Jarrett’s essay, “Inside Out: Thoughts on Free Playing,” deepens this philosophy. He distinguishes between artists who treat nothingness as lack and those who understand it as a state “pregnant with everything.” His notion of having “accidents on purpose” feels like a quiet manifesto for improvisation.

VII. Forms, Covers, Folkways, and Modernist Echoes

ECM’s visual identity receives eloquent treatment in Lars Müller’s “The ECM Cover.” Müller sees the label as transforming its musical philosophy into the realm of vision. The covers rarely illustrate the music directly, yet they exist in harmony with it—two verses from the same poem, not mirror images.

Karl Lippegaus, in “Colours, Densities, Forms,” traces how ECM reshaped folk music through artists such as Egberto Gismonti, Anouar Brahem, Lena Willemark, Savina Yannatou, Eleni Karaindrou, Gianluigi Trovesi, Shankar, and Dino Saluzzi. He also recounts asking Eicher why ECM albums open with five seconds of silence. Eicher laughed: “People need time to sit down, don’t they?”

Paul Griffiths’s “Against the Grain: Modernist Voices” reframes modernism not as rupture but as continuity. For example, in Thomas Demenga’s fifteen-year traversal of the Bach cello suites—paired with works by Holliger, Veress, and Isang Yun—Bach emerges as modern for his time, just as modern works echo the past. Griffiths writes lovingly of Holliger and Kurtág as poets, a lineage that includes the spoken-word forays of Bruno Ganz (to say nothing of Griffiths’s own).

Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich’s “All Roads Lead to Bach” both confirms and dismantles Bach’s mythic status. Bach was no passive vessel of divine inspiration but a laborious musical scientist whose work fell out of favor for decades. Returning to Bach, Jungheinrich argues, is an anti-Romantic gesture, one that resonates deeply with jazz musicians like Jarrett. Yet ultimately, the metaphor inverts itself: not all roads lead back to Bach; they stem from him outward into space and time.

VIII. Instruments, Futures, and the Listener’s Life

John Cratchley’s “ECM and the Guitar” charts the instrument’s breadth across the label—from Abercrombie, Towner, Connors, Frisell, Tibbetts, Rypdal, and Metheny to figures like Keith Rowe, Mick Goodrick, Derek Bailey, and Christy Doran—extending into the next generation with Jacob Young.

John Kelman’s “Present and Future Songs” characterizes ECM as a place of discovery. Alongside its mainstays, it has consistently welcomed new voices: Trygve Seim, Christian Wallumrød, Tord Gustavsen, Savina Yannatou. What unites them, Kelman writes, is not style but vision: “All hold humanity as paramount; all ask that music be accepted as a contradiction, engaging perfectionist ideal and practical imperfection.”

Geoff Dyer’s “Editions of Contemporary Me” offers a listener’s diary, his discovery of ECM entwined with the formation of his inner life. It makes me nostalgic for my own early listening sessions with friends, before digital fragmentation fractured albums into isolated tracks.

Further interviews, such as Griffiths and Lake’s with Eicher, reaffirm that the New Series was never a departure, only a continuation of ECM’s inner spirit. Thomas Steinfeld’s “Words and Music” explores the “aesthetical alliances” listeners inevitably draw across the label’s vast terrain.

IX. Voices, Engineers, and the Hand Holding the Key

Interleaved among the essays, Horizons Touched offers biographical sketches and first-person statements from ECM’s musicians, each a small window that opens onto a whole climate. These fragments do not merely annotate the label’s history; they humanize its method. They remind us that ECM’s continuity is not a doctrine but a chain of encounters: one musician hearing another across a room, across a record, across years, then walking away altered.

Jan Garbarek’s recollections of meeting Don Cherry glow with this catalytic force. Cherry’s folk sensibilities did not function as ornament or exotic garnish; they sank into Garbarek’s musical bloodstream, shaping how the saxophonist would understand melody as something older than genre, something carried like a story rather than “played” like a role. John Surman, too, appears not as a solitary figure descending fully formed but as someone who fell in with the Norwegian jazz scene by way of circumstance and gravity via Karin Krog’s quintet with Arild Andersen, Jon Christensen, Garbarek, and Terje Bjørklund—a scene, then, as a confluence of players finding shared weather.

The book is equally attentive to the invisible labor that turns vision into sound. Iro Haarla’s memories of bringing her partner Edward Vesala’s musical worlds to life are among the most moving examples. Vesala would sing ideas into a tape recorder—raw transmissions, half-formed, urgent—and Haarla would transcribe them, arrange them, translate the unrepeatable into something held and shared, using those recordings and other means of transmission. Here, creativity is shown not as solitary lightning but as an act of listening so deep it becomes architecture.

Generational echoes reverberate as well. Trygve Seim recalls his first encounter with Jan Garbarek—not in person, but through the spell of Eventyr, which set him on the path toward the saxophone at a time in his life when he was more interested in sports. That detail matters: it gives us the unmistakable sense of a life diverted by sound, a horizon touched early enough to become destiny.

From the New Series world, Kim Kashkashian offers a statement that feels like reassurance and challenge: the intense preparation of a recording is precisely when “preconceived notions are abandoned and the music is created anew.” ECM’s paradox—rigor as the gateway to freedom—finds proof in her fearless championing of Kurtág, Mansurian, Kancheli, and so many others, repertoire approached not as museum artifact but as living material, remade in the present tense. András Schiff appears, too, animated by a seeking spirit that never settles for attainment, spurring him toward greater interpretative levels, as if interpretation were not a finishing touch but an ethical pursuit, a way of staying in motion.

Anouar Brahem’s reflections widen the field again, returning us to that Godardian hinge where sight and sound exchange roles. He speaks of the silence that precedes image and the music that follows it, a dynamic mirrored in many bands along the ECM spectrum, where what is withheld becomes part of what is said, and where the breath before the phrase is meaning. Annette Peacock, in turn, expresses gratitude for Manfred Eicher, whose prophetic understanding of her essence became a leitmotif at ECM, less the discovery of a new artist than the recognition of someone already speaking in her own dialect, waiting for ears fluent enough to listen.

Several statements arrive like aphorisms—compact, paradoxical, strangely complete. Christian Wallumrød’s reflections on harmony and freedom turn composition and improvisation into mirror arts: “You write something because you couldn’t improvise it, and you improve something because it couldn’t be written.” Carla Bley’s slow, forward-thinking approach to making music is distilled into another truth earned over decades: “My solos usually end because I’ve had to abandon them.” Such statements suggest minds always moving ahead of what the hands can say.

Folk tradition is not treated as a quaint inheritance but as a living accumulation. Ale Möller speaks from deep knowledge, describing folk music as cumulative and locating ECM’s contribution in inward intensification, “increasing the inner density in music by reducing the external.” Dino Saluzzi sharpens this imperative by insisting on emotional sensitivity as the bridge to freedom: “Art doesn’t need muscles.” Robert Wilson’s poetic hymn to ECM (stylized as “Every Color Maginable”) extends the label into chromatic metaphysics. And Gidon Kremer, attentive to the bond between composer, performer, listener, articulates his love for Eicher’s vision of bringing them lucidly to us: “ECM stands for music intent on communicating something to us.”

Taken together, these voices form their own ensemble, less a supplement to the book than its beating heart. They do what ECM has always done at its best: place the “work” back into the work, the human back into myth, reminding us that the key is never merely the catalogue, the studio, the aesthetic.

The book closes not with an argument but with a gesture. Paul Griffiths raises a glass in the form of a prose poem written in Ophelian, in which meaning and music collapse into one another: “The key is in his hand. The key is his hand. There’s music in that hand.” The image lingers, unfinished, as if the act of letting go is where melody begins.

Leading up to this closing utterance is a dotted path of voices whose work has shaped ECM as surely as any score or improvisation. Reflections from photographers and visual artists—Roberto Masotti, Jan Jedlička, Jim Bengston, Mayo Bucher, Thomas Wunsch, Dieter Rehm—remind us that ECM’s sound has always traveled with an image, even when that image defies the conventions of illustration. Their contributions affirm the label’s belief that vision and music are parallel arts, each extending the other’s reach without collapsing into it.

Equally essential are the engineers, those who inhabit the threshold where intention becomes vibration. Peter Laenger, Jan Erik Kongshaug, James Farber, Stefano Amerio, and Gérard de Haro speak from within the studio’s invisible architecture, where listening is technical and moral. Amerio’s remark—“Recording for ECM means opening your mind to 360 degrees”—could stand as an epigraph for the enterprise. It names a practice of attention that is spherical rather than linear, attuned not only to what is played but to what surrounds it, precedes it, remains after it fades.

In ending this way, Horizons Touched refuses closure in the conventional sense. Instead, it disperses authorship, returning the music to the many hands that have shaped it, hands that frame images, tune microphones, adjust distances, wait for silence to speak. The key does not lock the door behind us. It stays in the hand, warm, provisional, ready to be passed on.

X. The Horizon Remains Open

Horizons Touched does not seek to close a circle. It leaves it slightly ajar, breathing. ECM has always seemed less concerned with preservation than with readiness for the next silence, the next alignment of breath and intention, the next sound that arrives without asking permission. To listen in this way is to relinquish certainty. It means accepting that meaning does not always announce itself, that music may resist immediate comprehension, that its most lasting truths often surface obliquely, long after the final note has faded. ECM’s legacy, if it can be called that, is not a fixed aesthetic but a discipline of sustained attention.

In this sense, the future of listening suggested here is neither utopian nor nostalgic. It is quieter, more demanding. It asks for patience in a culture of acceleration, for depth in a time of surfaces. It asks us to sit with ambiguity, to trust that what has not yet resolved may still be working on us, shaping us from within. The music does not rush to meet the listener; it waits. And in that waiting, something essential is restored.

Perhaps this is the true horizon being touched. Not a distant line toward which we move but a threshold we learn to inhabit. A space where sound and silence exchange roles, where intention loosens its grip, where listening becomes less about capture than encounter. The future implied by Horizons Touched is one in which music continues to arrive from unexpected directions, carrying with it traces of many worlds, yet asking only one thing in return: that we be present enough to hear it.

The horizon remains open because it must. To close it would be to mistake listening for possession. And ECM, at its heart, has never been about owning sound—only about making room for it, and trusting that what enters will know what to do next.

Thomas Strønen/Time Is A Blind Guide: Off Stillness (ECM 2842)

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Strønen/Time Is A Blind Guide
Off Stillness

Thomas Strønen drums
Ayumi Tanaka piano
Håkon Aase violin
Leo Svensson Sander violoncello
Ole Morten Vågen double bass
Recorded December 2021 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Peer Espen Ursfjord
Mixed July 2024 by Manfred Eicher, Thomas Strønen, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer) at Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: December 5, 2025

Off Stillness begins not with sound but with a memory, one that Thomas Strønen carries like a stone kept in the pocket of his youth, made rounder and smoother with time. His recollection of slipping unnoticed through a café kitchen in Tønsberg to witness his first jazz concert at age 15 is more than nostalgia; it’s an origin story. There, engulfed in the sounds of Jon Balke’s Oslo 13, was a revelation. Rhythm, he discovered, was not a grid but a worldview, a way for the body to converse with the unseen.

From this quiet prelude, the latest iteration of his band Time Is A Blind Guide opens with “Memories of Paul,” a piece that feels like stepping into the half-light of Rainbow Studio, a space that does not merely record music but seems to cultivate it. Despite the title, this is not a tribute to Motian or Bley so much as a meditation on the tension between lineage and selfhood. Ayumi Tanaka’s piano breathes first, the faint stirring of a creature waking in its natural habitat. Håkon Aase’s violin is a drifting breeze, Leo Svensson Sander’s cello a subterranean hum, and Ole Morten Vågan’s bass a slow-moving tide beneath the surface. Strønen’s drumming is the pulse of the room itself, a presence woven so delicately into the others that extracting any single thread seems almost sacrilegious.

As the album moves inward, the climate changes with “Season.” Here, the strings take on an arid beauty, as if we’ve been transported into a landscape shaped by centuries of shifting winds. The piece proceeds like an archaeological dig through sand and sovereignty, yet from this dryness small harmonies bloom, each a tiny flower of possibility pushing through historical sediment. The music astonishes by how much it conveys with so little, conjuring a vastness that feels earned rather than imposed.

The ensemble’s paradoxical strength, its ability to move loosely while bound by deep listening, emerges even more fully in “Fall.” The piece sways like a great creature with an internal compass that needs no magnetic north. Its journey nourishes itself, leaving behind traces—melodic footprints, rhythmic indentations—for the listener to follow. Time is not measured but wandered through.

The mood softens with “Tuesday,” a piece stripped to its essentials, left bare so its poetic speech can resonate. Whether the musicians play in unison or diverge into their own small eddies, they inhale and exhale as a single lung. It is tenderness as a means of clarity.

A shift occurs in “Cubism,” where architecture abounds. The piece balances on a precarious structure of boards and cylinders, a slow-motion circus act in which each rotation differs subtly from the last. Strønen provides the chemical uplift, one reaction setting off the next. Tanaka’s piano becomes an alkaline counterpoint to the more acidic strings, and together they settle into an equilibrium that feels strangely, beautifully neutral. The music is precise without being rigid, playful without losing its center.

Abstract shapes drift into form with “Dismissed,” which begins like an experiment suspended in midair. Its irregular surfaces soon accumulate heat, expanding into outbursts of collective energy. Metallic tensions shimmer and collapse, highs and lows collide, and the piece finally dissolves into a sonic steam rising from a cooling forge.

Then comes “In Awe of Stillness,” which glistens with a self-generated glow, moving as if guided by impulses as old as they are unnameable. Just when it feels ready to drift away, it recoils slightly, a moment of satoric self-recognition. This pause resets the ensemble for the next step in its nomadic journey. Even as the piece thickens into louder phrases and hints of groove, it never sacrifices atmosphere. Nothing is ornamental; everything breathes.

By the end, one realizes that Off Stillness is as much a pilgrimage as an artistic statement. Its stories do not unfold in straight lines but in spirals, circling back to that teenage boy in Tønsberg who planted a seed that has now grown into a tree in its own right. The music invites repeated listening not to decipher it but to inhabit it, each return revealing new details, like light shifting across the same landscape at different hours.

For all these reasons, it may well be—both in craft and in spirit—the ECM album of the year. There is truly nothing else like it.