Catalogue 2009/10 ECM Paul Griffiths Bread and Water
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Catalogue 2009/10 ECM Paul Griffiths Bread and Water Here is someone standing at the entrance to the gallery who goes on talking all the time while almost all the visitors who come are rushing by in their eagerness to inspect what is on show inside. The hall a little way beyond is packed with rare and wonderful things, beautifully laid out and informatively labelled. There is much to see, much to learn. This is what the visitors have come for. Why, then, linger at the doorway? Why wait? But you, you have stopped. Thank you. Yes, this is the gallery, this the exhibition: a catalogue. We can use the word either to mean this paper object you hold in your hands or the totality of items a publisher or, as in this case, record company has available for sale: the CATALOGUE, as we may put it. Such a CATALOGUE is changeable as the ocean is: things will go (though rarely, where ECM is concerned), more will come. The catalogue, on the other hand, is fixed, a photograph of the ocean. There was a moment, probably before it reached print, when the catalogue was identical with the CATALOGUE. But that moment has passed and will not come again, for the ocean is growing and the photograph cannot. Is the catalogue therefore impoverished? No, no more than a photograph is. This is no snapshot, no fuzzy image trapped half_thoughtlessly on a mobile phone. Look at what you have in your hands: this is something well made, something composed. A professional photographer must have been invited to make a study of the ocean. This is a special occasion, which deserves to be marked. The ocean is forty years old. It has grown from a minor sea, from a pool. It is hundreds of times bigger now than when it started. A photograph at this moment is apropos. Well, a photograph, we may agree, is for looking at, not talking about, and you will be impatient to go off and look at this one which – oh yes – a moment ago we were calling a gallery or an exhibition. The metaphors come thick and fast – all of them visual, which is odd when this is a catalogue for the ear. Soon you will want to go on in, but there is a little more to say about this ocean view, this display hall, this catalogue. By its very existence it speaks of pride. It goes far beyond the needs of utility. Feel the paper. Look at the quality of the illustrations (but not quite yet). Pride may be one of the deadly sins, but there is a virtuous pride in oneself that speaks of care and even of honouring others. That is the pride we sense here. We live in strange times. Such pride seems not to feature on MBA courses; it would get in the way. ECM has maintained the most oldfashioned of business practices while staying in tune with what is newest and most alive in music. There is no paradox in this, only the evidence of a concern with realities that are intangible and unsayable and certainly uncommercial and therefore, of course, widely overlooked. Something is being touched in ECM’s recordings. Something is being touched even here, in this catalogue. All right, maybe you should go and have a quick look. But come back, please, if you will. * As we were saying, something is being touched. That was so from the first. A striking number of ECM’s earliest recordings were made with artists whose staying power has fuelled a continuing association with the label: John Abercrombie, Arild Andersen, Paul Bley, Jack DeJohnette, Jan Garbarek, Dave Holland, Keith Jarrett, Steve Kuhn, Paul Motian, Enrico Rava, Terje Rypdal, Tomasz Stanko, Bobo Stenson, Ralph Towner. Several of these musicians were still in their mid_twenties at the time of their first ECM sessions; their development has been the label’s, and the label’s has been theirs. Improvised music since the beginning of the 1970s is importantly documented in the recordings here catalogued. Then something strange happened: the New Series. What had been pre_eminently a jazz label, for want of a better word, was now home also to classical music, for want of a better word. There had been some preparation for this in the release of recordings by New York musicians whose work was largely composed: Steve Reich and Meredith Monk. But the arrival of Arvo Pärt in 1984 opened all kinds of new doors: to connections with other composers from the already fading Soviet Union; to Bach, whether played by Keith Jarrett or by Thomas Demenga; to albums from the great early years of the chamber music festival at the Austrian castle of Lockenhaus; to troubadour songs sung by Paul Hillier; to Stockhauen and to Schubert. The distinctions did not fall away, but they became transparent. Qualities of permanence could now be recognized in the improvised work and of hesitation, incompletion in the composed. Partly this happened because the ECM CATALOGUE, running to several hundred albums by the end of the 1980s, was now almost a musical genre in its own right – a genre with blurred boundaries but a definite centre, in some place where music is prized wherever it comes from, some time when nothing has yet quite happened finally, when even a recording – seemingly the end of a process – can show its value in opening a question, or more than one. ECM’s jazz was never conventional, nor were its classical releases to be. You will find no Tchaikovsky in this catalogue, no Wagner (which is not to say that these composers will not enter the CATALOGUE some time, given the right combination of performer and project). Great reputations here are in abeyance. Masterpieces are made in the performance, not before. Beethoven, Mozart and Bach enter on a par with their lesser known colleagues, and do not seem discomfitted by the experience but, rather, refreshed. Music of our own time leads the field, as it should, this being our own time. Whether through the New Series or the old, the label had, by the turn of the century, formed relation- ships with a great range of musicians – relationships based on good will (another oldfashioned virtue), not contractual obligation. Joining those who had been ECM artists since the 1970s were pianists as different as Misha Alperin, András Schiff and Herbert Henck, other soloists including Kim Kashkashian, Charles Lloyd and Dino Saluzzi, and composers whom the label brought to light, such as Giya Kancheli, Eleni Karaindrou and Heiner Goebbels. And so it continues. New artists are joining the label all the time, necessitating a continuous increase in production at a time when the recording industry as a whole is in shock. Yet the quality of ECMness in the CATALOGUE has remained constant, as this catalogue will indicate. One wonders how this can be so. It is not just a matter of the sublime covers, which show and do not show, which seduce the eye while suggesting that, through the silence and the stillness, there is something to be heard. It is not just a matter of the superb sound, for engineering alone cannot make music. It is, perhaps, a quality of calm assurance underlying the invitations offered by cover and sound. ECM is, to be sure, a business; it exists in the marketplace. But so does the village baker, who finds the best that can be found to make the best that can be found, and who knows that it all depends on the trust of those who need bread. Paul Griffiths Brot und Wasser Da steht jemand am Eingang zur Galerie, der unablässig redet, während fast alle anderen Besucher schnell vorbeigehen vor lauter Neugierde, sich endlich anzuschauen, was da drinnen ausgestellt wird. Der Saal etwas weiter hinten ist gestopft voll mit seltenen und wunderbaren Dingen, die aufs Schönste präsentiert und informativ beschriftet sind. Es gibt viel zu sehen und zu lernen. Genau darum sind die Besucher her- gekommen. Warum dann also am Eingang herumstehen? Warum warten? Aber Sie sind stehengeblieben. Danke. Ja, dies ist die Galerie, dies ist die Ausstellung: ein Katalog. Wir können dieses Wort benutzen, weil wir das Objekt aus Papier, das Sie in der Hand halten, meinen oder aber die Gesamtheit der Produkte, die ein Verlag oder, wie in diesem Fall, eine Schallplattenfirma, zum Verkauf bereit hält: den KATALOG, wie wir es nennen wollen. Ein solcher KATALOG ist wandelbar wie das Meer: Dinge verschwinden (wenn auch nur selten im Falle von ECM), andere kommen dazu. Der Katalog jedoch ist etwas Festgehaltenes, ist eine Fotografie des Meeres. Wahrscheinlich noch vor der Drucklegung hat es einen Augenblick gegeben, da der Katalog identisch war mit dem KATALOG. Doch dieser Augenblick ist vorüber und wird nicht wiederkommen, denn das Meer wächst beständig, und das Foto kann das nicht. Ist der Katalog also eine Verkürzung? Nein, auch nicht mehr als eine Fotografie. Er ist schließlich kein Schnappschuss, kein unscharfes Bild, wie es halb gedankenverloren mit einem Handy geschossen wird. Sehen Sie sich an, was Sie da in der Hand halten: Es ist etwas sorgfältig Gemachtes, etwas Komponiertes. Ein professioneller Fotograf muss gebeten worden sein, eine Studie vom Meer zu liefern. Das ist eine be- sondere Gelegenheit, die verdient hat, festgehalten zu werden. Dieser Ozean ist vierzig Jahre alt. Er ist aus einem kleineren Gewässer, aus einem Wasserbecken erwachsen. Er ist jetzt mehrere hundertmal größer als zu Beginn. Eine Fotografie zu diesem Zeitpunkt hat ihren Sinn. Nun gut, ein Foto ist, dem können wir zustimmen, zum Anschauen da, nicht zum darüber Reden, und Sie werden bereits ungeduldig sein, sich endlich dieses hier anschauen zu können, das wir noch – ja, genau – vor einem Augenblick Galerie oder Ausstellung genannt haben.