An Intro to ECM in 11 Albums

ECM turns 55 in 2024. Here's my personal beginner's selection from the iconic label's catalog

It’s 1997, and I share an apartment with a friend who’s an aspiring jazz pianist. We’re both supposed to study law, but rather spend our time discussing books and records.

I’m into hip-hop, downbeat and drum and bass, all of which heavily sample jazz records from the 1970s.

My flatmate is into actual jazz records from the 1970s.

He constantly brings home treasures from flea markets and second hand shops. I notice that some of them – by artists such as Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Carla Bley, Steve Kuhn – not just look and sound terrific, but seem to represent a similar vision.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but in our frequent living room listening sessions, I learn they were all released on a German label: ECM, which stands for Edition of Contemporary Music.

Fast forward two decades, and I find myself in another informal listening session, this time in the ECM offices on the Western outskirts of Munich.

Legendary producer and label co-founder Manfred Eicher plays unreleased recordings from blank CDs for a small group of employees and guests. We sit scattered across the few chairs and the floor; Eicher stands behind his desk, overlooking towers of records, books, and newspaper articles. There’s not a single digital screen in sight.

yours truly in the ECM hallways, Munich

It’s 2017, and I’ve recently joined Spotify as a senior music editor. As one of the few jazz experts on staff, I curate a number of major playlists in the genre and was drafted into the team working on the ECM streaming launch.¹

When it finally happens in November of that year, press coverage is massive: Everyone from Pitchfork to the New York Times dedicates stories to the news that the label catalogue is now available across all platforms. It was one of the last major streaming hold-backs of the music industry.

Artists and critics share their favorites from the catalogue, which encompasses more than 1,600 albums at the time.

ECM is one of those rare labels that has guarded its quality control. Every once in a while, one of their releases celebrated a huge success. Still, Eicher always stayed true to his vision. He never ‘sold out’.

His initial skepticism towards streaming was based on valid reasons, one of them being low sound quality. The German producer’s standards are notoriously high. ECM albums are captured in some of the best studios in the world on high-end analog equipment.

Some say they all sound like they were recorded in a church. Each album begins with exactly five seconds of silence, just to set the scene.²

ECM records are just made to be pressed on vinyl or CD. They look great, because of the label’s high demands in design, photography and typography. The covers rarely show the musicians. Eicher picks most cover images himself, from the archives of fine-art photographers he’s been working closely with for years.

I’ve stayed an ECM fan, ever since those mid-1990s student days. I even flew to Brussels in 2019 for the label’s 50th anniversary, an impressive multi-day festival in the Flagey concert hall. In 2023, I went to see the Concert for Manfred Eicher at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, an evening-filling programme with a star-studded line-up.

2024 marks ECM’s 55th anniversary. For this occasion, I picked 11 albums that truly encompass the label spirit to me, spanning from the early days until today, with a focus on records I’ve been playing a lot recently.

This is not a list of ‘the best ECM records’.

They’re not the most obvious picks, or the biggest commercial sellers – just a personal selection of 11 favorites I’d point a curious listener to, if asked for a beginner’s guide or even a more advanced deep dive into the catalog.

Enjoy.