Music: Sounds from a White Room

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ECM starts its second decade as the world's top jazz label

Imagine a typical jazz recording session: a bunch of cooled-out dudes breeze into the studio some time between soon and whenever, take a drink or two, pass some smoke and lay down some tracks by and by. No sweat, no strain, see you later.

Forget it. That kind of scene may get by—marginally—in the movies, but at ECM Records it would be considered strictly for the tourist trade. There is a sort of house high-seriousness about all the diverse jazz on the ECM label. For its sessions, one must attune one's mythic misconceptions accordingly.

Typically, Manfred Eicher, 35, the founder, manager and premier producer of ECM, will fly his musicians into a Norwegian studio nicknamed the Whale, right in the heart of downtown Oslo. The musicians start to work as soon as they shake off the jet lag. An album usually takes two days to record—a day for each side—with a third day reserved for mixing. Very businesslike, minimal distractions. Oslo is short on hotspots likely to divert attention from the matter at hand. For fun, the musicians trundle off to the Edvard Munch Museum.

The image of jazz musicians recreating beside one of Munch's images of spiritual frenzy and psychic fear is not lacking in amusing undertones or, for that matter, in cultural cross references: Munch worked out of the same abyss, after all, as Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman. ECM is a haven for many of the descendants of these jazz giants and stresses a kind of stylistic riskiness underpinned by sobriety. The music that has done the most to build the five-man European company into the world's most thriving jazz label ranges in style and quality from the vaulting improvisational rhapsodies of Keith Jarrett to the congenial jazz-rock fusion of Pat Metheny and the slick sketches of Chick Corea. Jarrett, Metheny and Corea account for most of the label's top ten albums. Jarrett's ravishingly beautiful The Köln Concert, released in 1975, has sold more than 750,000 copies—a strong showing for a double album in any league, even rock.

This sort of corporate taste, together with an obviously strong case of business smarts, has got ECM a felicitous distribution arrangement with Warner Bros. Records, which takes care of manufacturing and marketing and gives Eicher a free creative hand. Eicher, in turn, gives them not only jazz that sells records—a rare enough commodity—but jazz to boast about, jazz that sets a style and a standard. A young jazz musician would want an ECM label the way a short-story writer would want to be published in The New Yorker.