A Shot of the Auteur Label

Santa Barbara offers so many amenities all its own, but when I leave in a couple months, I think I’ll miss one local resource more than anything: KCSB’s music library. This surely doesn’t come as a surprise to readers who’ve followed me on my many textual forays into the station’s filled-to-bursting shelves of jazz, folk, rock, classical, hip-hop, blues, and otherwise. But you can’t find a large chunk of the library’s most sonically fascinating stock filed under one particular genre; you can only find it by keeping an eye out, in any section, for a certain kind of consistently plain yet distinctively striking album spine design. I speak, of course, about the recordings of Editions of Contemporary Music (ECM).

I’ve praised ECM in this space before, as has The Indy’s own Josef Woodard in his column, Fringe Beat. In fact, I’ve even urged him to come back to KCSB’s airwaves — yes, he was once a KCSBer — on The Indy’s KCSB show, Poodle Radio, thus bringing this all full circle somehow. But Joe has me beat in the fandom department, having written an essay for the anthology Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM. Not to accuse the label’s majesty of inspiring only one book; its cover images alone have brought about Lars Müller’s Sleeves of Desire and Windfall Light. And let’s not forget Norbert Wiedmer and Peter Guyer’s recent ECM-centered documentary, Sounds and Silence.

What about ECM inspires such enthusiasm, such devotion? I would submit that it all comes down to the strong personality and idiosyncratic sensibility guiding the ship — the presence of an auteur, if you will. Manfred Eicher, musician, producer, Jean-Luc Godard collaborator, and ECM’s founder and helmsman, launched the label as a European jazz-only outfit back in 1969. Over the ensuing decades, its geographic scope widened a little and its stylistic scope widened a lot; in came classical, avant-garde, modern orchestral, early, and even sacred music. Still, something intangible links an ECM recording of a Norwegian saxophonist from 1972, an ECM recording of a Turkish oud player from 1989, and an ECM recording of an Estonian choir from last week, and it’s something beyond Eicher’s formidable Teutonic mien, something beyond that neato sleeve design.