Der blaue Klang

ECM is a record label and an authority. Forty years ago, when Manfred Eicher founded the company in Munich, the most influential jazz recordings came from America. That changed with Eicher's work. Today, Edition of Contemporary Music (ECM) is considered the most important label for jazz and—after ECM New Series was added in 1984—for modern music of the past and present. There is no other European or American record company with such consistent quality, no other producer with such a global reputation, no other product with such a distinctive image, and no other ongoing work that has had such an influence on current musical developments and shaped the reception of sound. Groundbreaking composers and performers such as Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Arvo Pärt, and György Kurtág have released the essential works of their oeuvre on ECM. More than a thousand records and CDs have now been released on the Munich label. With the publication of Der blaue Klang (The Blue Sound), the editors aim to document ECM's wide-ranging influence and place it in the context of aesthetic, economic, and cultural-political trends. The book contains the lectures from a symposium held as part of an ECM focus at the Enjoy Jazz festival in October 2009, supplemented by contributions that demonstrate the commitment of ECM and Manfred Eicher in the fields of film, theater, and literature. The volume concludes with a chronicle of forty years of ECM.

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