I remember the first ECM record I ever bought. It was Kenny Wheeler’s Deer Wan, found in the corner of a Stirling charity shop nearly 20 years ago. The trumpeter’s ensemble oozed mellifluous, reverberated soundscapes and I was captivated by the ultra cool minimalist cover art and pristine sans serif typography. I knew there was something special about it.
Founded by producer Manfred Eicher in 1969, Editions in Contemporary Music or ECM Records became an iconic European and global label in the latter part of the 20th century in the same way Blue Note, Impulse or Prestige did in the United States in preceding decades. With strong production and design ethics the label and its subsidiaries’ catalogue of more than 1,000 releases – most produced by Eicher – across classical, jazz, new age and contemporary composition ranges from Chick Corea and Pat Metheny to composers such as Steve Reich and John Adams and vocal chamber group the Hilliard Ensemble. Keith Jarrett’s 1975 Koln Concert
is ECM’s biggest selling and probably best-known album.
Classically-trained Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bartsch is one of a new generation of ECM recording artists who are at the vanguard of the label’s genre defying evolution. Two albums and constant touring with his band Ronin – which refers to the lonely, masterless warriors in Japanese samurai – have taken their self-described “ritual groove music” or “zen funk” to exhilarating new heights.
Set squarely across the front of the ICA stage, the quintet’s opening suite uncoiled drone-like, spiraling rhythms with delicate rattles and shakes from percussionist
Andi Pupato over which a circular melody and complex harmonic interconnections unfolded between piano and the lower register musings of Bjorn Meyer’s bass, Sha on Contrabass and bass clarinet and kit drummer Kaspar Rast.
Another section could have been Soft Machine in Eastern-ambient mode as a rhyme-like psychedelic phrase breezed with a trance-inducing cadence amid an amazing array of polymetric pulses. Elsewhere the leader’s timbre experimentation, scratching and plucking the piano’s inner strings recalled the berimbau of Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos.
To paraphrase Joe Zawinul’s description of group improvisation as “We always solo, we never solo”, one could say of Bartsch’s Ronin that: “A lot happens and nothing happens”, as a simple one note spatial excursion flows into multi-layered textures of hypnotic minimalism. The music doesn’t so much build as amass. A powerful funk encore concluded a hugely impressive set.
