“YOU CAN’T RECORD EVERYBODY…”
Eicher doesn’t quite win the all-time prize for longevity. Edward Lewis started Decca (UK) in 1929 and owned it until 1980. David Sarnoff controlled RCA from 1919-70. William Paley did the same at Columbia from 1938-88. But unlike those other, financially heftier titans, who deferred to department heads and studio producers, Eicher has supervised every single one of ECM’s albums—more than 1,600 of them—signing the musicians, sometimes creating the band, ordering (sometimes suggesting) the tracks, almost always manning the sessions in person, even approving (in many cases, designing) the distinctive, minimalist covers—all while remaining an independent company.
The closest parallel in jazz is Blue Note Records, which Alfred Lion founded in 1939 and ran with an iron fist, assembling a rotating roster of house musicians who played in a similar, or at least tightly compatible, style. But Lion retired in 1967, and the label passed to a series of corporate owners, at one point going dormant except for reissues. (In its current revival, under Don Was, it is owned by Universal Music.)
The comparison with Blue Note is instructive because, in many ways, ECM stands as its aesthetic opposite. Blue Note in its heyday catalogued the experimental reaches of late-1940s bebop (from Thelonious Monk to Miles Davis’s ) and the back-beat-driven, two-horn harmony slick of late-1950s post-bop (Art Blakey, Hank Mobley, John Coltrane’s ). By contrast, ECM has explored the quieter, more complex, almost spiritual side of jazz. Blue Note embodied the hip modern jazz of the New York scene; ECM has presented a
