ECM Records at 50 Steve Harris brings you the story of the influential audiophile jazz label

摘要

History books tell you that jazz first crossed the Atlantic with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who made their first records in 1917 and came to England in 1919. And that it was the coincidentally-named orchestra leader and composer James Reese Europe who first brought genuine African-American music to French ears with his black US army band in 1918. However it began, Europe's love affair with American jazz never ended. Later, and particularly in the 1960s when jazz was being squeezed out by rock, many American musicians found that they were more popular in Europe than they were at home. Players of free jazz, who'd often struggled to gain any acceptance, found they were far more welcome in, for example, Germany, which in the late 1960s had its own avant-garde scene. It was against this background that ECM got started. The German label became easily the leading proponent of both jazz in Europe and of European jazz - to make a subtle distinction. Eventually it would combine the two, and then go beyond accepted boundaries to offer music that combined genres and created new ones, and it would go on doing this for decades. All thanks to its visionary founder, still at the helm after half a century.