Last Dance

“The most beautiful sound next to silence.” That’s been ECM’s motto for the past fifty years. Manfred Eicher, the charismatic founder of the Munich label, seems to live in a parallel universe. And jazz sounds different on planet ECM. It is often thanks to this label that artists such as Keith Jarrett, Charles Lloyd, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea have recorded their best records. Even more so than with Blue Note or Impulse! Limiting the whole history of this extraordinary label to just 10 records would be mission impossible. So, these 10 albums will tell not “the” story but “a” story of ECM.

Rooted in dance and eventually becoming its very own artistic movement, the history of tango is an epic one; and its future truly looks limitless. A musical genre with hybrid origins, it remains one of the most incredible creations to come out of Río de la Plata. “It’s the only thing we don’t ask Europe for its opinion on,” wrote Argentina’s Macedonio Fernández, the man that young Jorge Luis Borges admired “to the point of devout and passionate plagiarism.” A number of coincidences in the late 19th century gave rise to this style of music. As musicologist Carlos Vega said: "no one really tried to create tango." And yet, here it is; complete with its own traditions and innovations, as well as its own golden age, ill-fated artists, myths and rituals.

At the start of his busy career Keith Jarrett spent seven years carrying out all manner of crazy experiments with his American Quartet. Between the years of 1971 and 1976, the pianist, alongside Charlie Haden, Paul Motian and Dewey Redman ran some kind of mad laboratory in which the genres of hard bop, free-jazz, world and avant-garde would all come together. A spontaneous and interesting time worth rediscovering.