The ECM Sound Edition

On “lo-fi beats to study to,” one busted piano, and what makes us human.

Jason Boog leads editorial at Fable, a social reading platform for book clubs. He is also the author of The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today and contributor of The Euchre Edition and The Shaggy Dog Edition for WITI.

Jason here. One night in January 1975, the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett showed up late and exhausted for a sold-out solo show at the Köln Opera House in West Germany, only to discover that the stagehands had delivered him a busted piano. “It was a Bösendorfer whose tones could not be played in the upper and lower octaves,” the mortified concert promoter recalled after the debacle. “In the middle, the black keys clamped, the pedals did not work, and the strings were torn.” Jarrett was a 29-year-old pro who had played with legends like Art Blakley and Miles Davis, so he made the last-minute decision to play this damaged instrument for 1,400 audience members, improvising an hour of the loveliest music I’ve ever heard. As he plays, Jarrett hums, wails, and stomps along with the notes, channeling a cosmic composition through that broken piano. 

The visionary producer and ECM Records founder Manfred Eicher recorded the performance, and soon released it as the now-immortalized two-record “The Köln Concert” set. “I watched with amazement as ‘The Köln Concert’ entered the mainstream culture, reaching an audience that I might have thought immune to the appeal of jazz piano,” wrote the great music critic Ted Gioia, who first introduced me to this album. “It eventually sold more than 3 million copies, and for a time ranked as the top-selling solo piano album in history.”

For decades to come, this record helped define the elusive but distinctive style of Manfred Eicher’s label, now known as “the ECM sound.” That label has been my soundtrack these last few months, playing on my headphones while I’m working or spinning on my record player when friends visit. With more than 2,000 albums, the ECM catalog contains equally creative feats by masters of almost any instrument, from piano, guitar, bass, sitar, saxophone, vibraphone, or drums. As a writer who needs many hours to pound even a short newsletter into something presentable, this level of improvisation seems like sorcery to me.

Why is this interesting?

“There are people who feel that the best music is the most boring music, which allows them to go about their business and not have to listen with any amount of energy,” Keith Jarrett once told pianist and journalist Robert Doerschuk. “Then there are other people who think that it should be so cerebrally ultra-interesting that, other than that, nothing in the music exists. And in the middle somewhere, the core of listeners must still be jazz listeners.”

After spending too much of my Spotify era consuming playlists on the “boring music” side of this spectrum (albeit with occasional forays into “ultra-interesting” through the guidance of trusted sources like Herb Sundays), I’ve recently started to explore that unquantifiable “middle somewhere.” As I grow my ECM record collection, I listen to playlists like “ECM Meditation” and “ECM Atmospheres” for daily inspiration. I love being swept along by somebody else’s creative flow, without the hangover you get from sugary easy-listening music. That's what makes the ECM sound so perfect during late-night conversations or deep-focus editing sessions.

Although the ECM sound cannot be labeled with algorithmic precision, the industrialization of creativity has accelerated these last few years. Someday soon, Spotify will serve me AI-generated songs that noodle at the same tenor and pitch as an ECM artist. I already wonder about the humanness of the lo-fi beats and atmospheric piano playlists I used to listen to on a daily basis. Most of that music is now packaged with photos of landscapes, sunsets, or AI-generated art instead of human faces. 

With the music labels already suing AI music generators, many wonder what the future might look like after the flood of generated music arrives (just like writing machines have already overwhelmed readers). Ted Gioia, the music critic who set me on this journey in the first place, recently consoled a French creator overwhelmed by the industrialization of creativity. Although the jazz historian spoke very generally about art, his advice invokes the holy human bond at the heart of the ECM sound that will always elude music generators:

“If you build your creative vocation on human elements, you will always have something to offer the world that machines cannot usurp. And audiences will respond to precisely those human elements, because that's what they crave too. Art embodies an authentic relationship between the artist and the audience. The key elements of this relationship can never be mechanized without collapsing into pathos or parody.” 

Quick Links:

• If you’re looking for a very ancient way to get into the creative flow, try my favorite I Ching app. It’s a simple way to shake things up and see your world from a different angle. 

• WITI writers James Cooper and Rick Webb turned me onto “The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds” by John Higgs, both a super well-reported work of rock history and a handbook for harnessing chaos in creative ways. 

• Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker newsletter is always worth reading, but everybody should check out his essay about the songwriter behind “Nature Boy,” a strange and wonderful song with a bittersweet story behind it.  

Piano of the Day:

(Image via Wikipedia)

Before his fabled concert, Keith Jarrett had been promised a gleaming Bösendorfer Model 290 Imperial, one of the greatest pianos ever crafted (with a $200,000-$300,000 price tag these days). Thank goodness he got that broken old piano instead. (JB)