Manfred Eicher
Encyclopedia
Manfred Eicher is a German
record producer
and the founder of ECM Records and its subsidiaries.
Eicher studied music at the Academy of Music in Berlin
. He is a record producer and a double-bass player. In 1969 he founded a record label in Munich
called ECM - Edition of Contemporary Music. Some of the famous artists he has recorded over the last 40 years are Keith Jarrett
, Jan Garbarek
, Chick Corea
, Gary Burton
, Jack DeJohnette
, Anouar Brahem
, Dave Holland
, Pat Metheny
, Ralph Towner
, Terje Rypdal
, Steve Kuhn
, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago
.
A notable record ECM released in its early years was The Köln Concert
, a solo piano performance by Keith Jarrett. Nearly as well known is the early Pat Metheny recording American Garage
.
In 1984 Eicher started up a new label, ECM New Series, for written music, or European classical music. Some of the artists whose work was released on the New Series were Steve Reich
, Arvo Pärt
, John Adams
, Meredith Monk
, and the mediaeval composer Pérotin
. Perhaps the most remarkable record was the best-seller Officium
(1994), a collaboration between Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble
, performing some compositions by Cristóbal de Morales
, Pérotin and others.
In 1992 Manfred Eicher co-directed and co-wrote the film Holozän (Man in the Holocene). In 2002 he wrote the film score for the film Kedma.
Eicher has produced most of the records released on his label. On average, each jazz record takes just two days to record and one day to mix. Most of the records have been recorded with Jan Erik Kongshaug (of Talent Studios and later Rainbow Studios) as sound engineer. To date Manfred Eicher has produced more than a thousand albums.
Comparable figures who established recording labels with artists with characteristic performing styles, or sounds, include: Berry Gordy
, Herb Alpert
/Jerry Moss
, William Ackerman
, and David Geffen
.
Quote: "I believe the producer’s role is to capture the music he likes, to present it to those who don’t know it yet."
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
record producer
Record producer
A record producer is an individual working within the music industry, whose job is to oversee and manage the recording of an artist's music...
and the founder of ECM Records and its subsidiaries.
Eicher studied music at the Academy of Music in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. He is a record producer and a double-bass player. In 1969 he founded a record label in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
called ECM - Edition of Contemporary Music. Some of the famous artists he has recorded over the last 40 years are Keith Jarrett
Keith Jarrett
Keith Jarrett is an American pianist and composer who performs both jazz and classical music.Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music; as...
, Jan Garbarek
Jan Garbarek
Jan Garbarek is a Norwegian tenor and soprano saxophonist, active in the jazz, classical, and world music genres. Garbarek was born in Mysen, Norway, the only child of a former Polish prisoner of war Czesław Garbarek and a Norwegian farmer's daughter...
, Chick Corea
Chick Corea
Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea is an American jazz pianist, keyboardist, and composer.Many of his compositions are considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis' band in the 1960s, he participated in the birth of the electric jazz fusion movement. In the 1970s he formed Return to Forever...
, Gary Burton
Gary Burton
Gary Burton is an American jazz vibraphonist.A true original on the vibraphone, Burton developed a pianistic style of four-mallet technique as an alternative to the usual two-mallets. This approach caused Burton to be heralded as an innovator and his sound and technique are widely imitated...
, Jack DeJohnette
Jack DeJohnette
Jack DeJohnette is an American jazz drummer, pianist, and composer. He is one of the most influential jazz drummers of the 20th century, due to extensive work as leader and sideman for musicians like Miles Davis, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Keith Jarrett and Sonny...
, Anouar Brahem
Anouar Brahem
Anouar Brahem is an oud player and composer. He is widely acclaimed as an innovator in his field...
, Dave Holland
Dave Holland
Dave Holland is an English jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader who has been performing and recording for five decades. He has lived in the United States for 40 years....
, Pat Metheny
Pat Metheny
Patrick Bruce "Pat" Metheny is an American jazz guitarist and composer.One of the most successful and critically acclaimed jazz musicians to come to prominence in the 1970s and '80s, he is the leader of the Pat Metheny Group and is also involved in duets, solo works and other side projects...
, Ralph Towner
Ralph Towner
Ralph Towner is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger and bandleader. He plays the twelve-string guitar, classical guitar, piano, synthesizer, percussion and trumpet.-Biography:...
, Terje Rypdal
Terje Rypdal
Terje Rypdal is a Norwegian guitarist and composer. Most of his music has been released on albums of the German record label ECM. Rypdal has collaborated both as a guitarist and as a composer with other ECM artists such as Ketil Bjørnstad and David Darling...
, Steve Kuhn
Steve Kuhn
Steve Kuhn is an American jazz pianist, composer and trio leader.-Biography:He began studying piano at the age of five and studied under Boston piano teacher Margaret Chaloff, mother of jazz baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff, who taught him the "Russian style" of piano playing. At an early age he...
, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago
Art Ensemble of Chicago
The Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz ensemble that grew out of Chicago's AACM in the late 1960s. The group continues to tour and record through 2006, despite the deaths of two of the founding members....
.
A notable record ECM released in its early years was The Köln Concert
The Köln Concert
The Köln Concert is a recording by the pianist Keith Jarrett of solo piano improvisations performed at the Cologne Opera House in Cologne on January 24, 1975 before a live audience...
, a solo piano performance by Keith Jarrett. Nearly as well known is the early Pat Metheny recording American Garage
American Garage
-Track listing:-Personnel:* Pat Metheny - 6 & 12-String Guitar* Lyle Mays - Piano, Oberheim, Autoharp, Organ* Mark Egan - Bass* Dan Gottlieb - Drums-Charts:Album - Billboard-Trivia:...
.
In 1984 Eicher started up a new label, ECM New Series, for written music, or European classical music. Some of the artists whose work was released on the New Series were Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
, Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from...
, John Adams
John Coolidge Adams
John Coolidge Adams is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer with strong roots in minimalism. His best-known works include Short Ride in a Fast Machine , On the Transmigration of Souls , a choral piece commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks , and Shaker...
, Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...
, and the mediaeval composer Pérotin
Pérotin
Pérotin , also called Perotin the Great, was a European composer, believed to be French, who lived around the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century. He was the most famous member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony and the ars antiqua style...
. Perhaps the most remarkable record was the best-seller Officium
Officium (album)
Officium is an album by Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and early music vocal group, The Hilliard Ensemble, that was released in 1994....
(1994), a collaboration between Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble
Hilliard Ensemble
The Hilliard Ensemble is a British male vocal quartet originally devoted to the performance of early music. Founded in 1974, the group is named after the Elizabethan miniaturist painter Nicholas Hilliard....
, performing some compositions by Cristóbal de Morales
Cristóbal de Morales
Cristóbal de Morales was a Spanish composer of the Renaissance. He is generally considered to be the most influential Spanish composer before Victoria.- Life :...
, Pérotin and others.
In 1992 Manfred Eicher co-directed and co-wrote the film Holozän (Man in the Holocene). In 2002 he wrote the film score for the film Kedma.
Eicher has produced most of the records released on his label. On average, each jazz record takes just two days to record and one day to mix. Most of the records have been recorded with Jan Erik Kongshaug (of Talent Studios and later Rainbow Studios) as sound engineer. To date Manfred Eicher has produced more than a thousand albums.
- Eicher’s deceptively simple aesthetic is unfailingly harmonious. He records musicians he likes, allows them to trust their own instincts, and plays a directorial role... His firm but nurturing hand helped to set down some of great jazz works of the past 30 years. (Jazz Review
Jazz Review
Jazz Review was a British jazz magazine, founded in 1998 by a former editor of The Wire and jazz writer Richard Cook and Roger Spence of the talent management agency Direct Music. The magazine covered the entire range of jazz history from early jazz, through Swing to Bebop, Modern Jazz and the...
)
Comparable figures who established recording labels with artists with characteristic performing styles, or sounds, include: Berry Gordy
Berry Gordy
Berry Gordy, Jr. is an American record producer, and the founder of the Motown record label, as well as its many subsidiaries.-Early years:...
, Herb Alpert
Herb Alpert
Herbert "Herb" Alpert is an American musician most associated with the group variously known as Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, or TJB. He is also a recording industry executive — he is the "A" of A&M Records...
/Jerry Moss
Jerry Moss
Jerome S. "Jerry" Moss is an American recording executive, best known for being the co-founder of A&M Records, along with trumpeter and bandleader Herb Alpert....
, William Ackerman
William Ackerman
William Ackerman is a Grammy winning guitarist and composer of acoustic-based instrumental music. He founded and ran for many years the influential New Age record label Windham Hill Records.- Career :...
, and David Geffen
David Geffen
David Geffen is an American record executive, film producer, theatrical producer and philanthropist. Geffen is noted for creating Asylum Records in 1970, Geffen Records in 1980, and DGC Records in 1990...
.
Quote: "I believe the producer’s role is to capture the music he likes, to present it to those who don’t know it yet."
Awards
- 1986 honorary “German Record Critics Award” for his achievements
- 1998 Music Prize of the City of Munich.
- 1999 Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star from the King of SwedenSwedenSweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
- 1999 V Class Order of the Cross of St. Mary’s Land from the President of EstoniaEstoniaEstonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
- 2000 Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Brighton in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the development of contemporary music.
- 2001 Commander of the Royal Order of Merit from the King of NorwayNorwayNorway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
. - 2002 Grammy AwardGrammy AwardA Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...
for Classical Producer of the Year, nominated again in the same category for 2003 and 2004.