September 22nd, 1970. Manfred Eicher has travelled up to Oslo from Munich, to produce a recording with an “Alain Delon type person with a tenor saxophone”. Eicher is a 27-year-old double-bass-player-turned-producer with experience working at Deutsche Grammophon, who the previous year set up his own fledgling record label, Edition of Contemporary Music (ECM for short).
Now six records in, for the seventh he is taking a chance on this young 23-year-old Norwegian saxophonist whose unique sound had drawn him in two years earlier, in 1968, when he heard him rehearsing with noted American composer George Russell. Also at that 1968 performance were three other young Norwegian musicians, guitarist Terje Rypdal, bassist Arild Andersen and drummer Jon Christensen, each now present to make this new quartet recording, in the Sonja Henie Museum in Oslo.
Things aren’t quite going to plan. The reverberant space of the museum is not suiting the sound of the group. At night, a decision is made to call a halt to the recording and to try somewhere else. Arild Andersen knows a young engineer, Jan Erik Kongshaug, who has recently started working at the Bendiksen recording studio in Oslo. He gives him a call.
The studio was available to record with Kongshaug late that evening. Eicher and the band decamped to the studio and a landmark recording, “Afric Pepperbird”, was made.
It is a special breed of musician whose unique voice as a player can be instantly recognisable from as little as a single musical phrase, and few instrumental voices in music can be more instantly identifiable than Garbarek’s soaring Nordic tone. “Afric Pepperbird” was a milestone recording; the release that first brought this unique musical voice to the attention of an international audience, and a significant turning point for ECM.
I recently returned to the very earliest releases on ECM, listening to the first dozen or so recordings on the label in order. Reaching “Afric Pepperbird”, I was struck by just how much of the future aesthetic of the label coalesces on this album.
Each of the musicians – Garbarek, Rypdal, Anderson and Christensen – as well as engineer Kongshaug (and in a wider sense, Norway itself) were making their first connection with ECM on this album, and each would go on to be closely intertwined with the label over the decades that followed. This was the first ECM release where all the participants remained closely associated with the label.
ECM was formed at a crossroads in jazz when the freedom and complexity growing out of the music of Ornette Coleman, late-period John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and others contrasted with the electric instrumentation and integration of elements from rock and funk being instigated by Miles Davis and the prodigious young musicians around him. Elements of both musical directions had an influence on the music of ECM, but the freeness of the earliest releases is striking (including recordings by German ensemble Just Music, American saxophonist Marion Brown, and an album with noted British free improvisors Evan Parker and Derek Bailey).
“Afric Pepperbird” both continues this exploration of the “free” and points to something different. Garbarek’s raw intensity was yet to give way to the soaring Nordic lyricism of later years. There is a strong feeling of the influence of Coltrane-associated players such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, but Garbarek’s sound is already unique at this point. Garbarek has been overt about the influence of the free movement at this point in his music, particularly in having the opportunity to perform alongside one of its beacons, US trumpeter Don Cherry, in 1967 (when Garbarek was just 20)
“We were all in awe of this very special person who had actually played with Ornette [Coleman], one of our big heroes… He did things so effortlessly, freely; the music he played flowed so freely from him… Back then, I was definitely all in favour of freedom and there he was: Mr Total Freedom, right in front of us!”
“Blow Away Zone” is the wildest of the album’s free excursions, but what is striking here is the sheer clarity of the sound. There is more intensity here than on later ECM releases, with Garbarek growling and wailing over some furiously polyrhythmic drumming from Christensen, but the sonic presentation keeps every element crystal clear and focussed. The recording quality is a key component of the album in this respect, and one that laid the groundwork for future ECM releases. Looking back on the session, Eicher has said that, as well as the quality of the music
“It came out as an amazing sound production as well, because we experimented and set up a sound that was unheard of, even for this group. It was really a great experience. And I travelled back to Munich, with five reels of multitrack tapes, feeling very proud.”
Garbarek went on to be perhaps the most significant European voice in jazz to emerge in the latter half of the twentieth century, reaching a wide audience through his further ECM albums and touring and recording with pianist Keith Jarrett. ECM went on to become one of the most important record labels in jazz, classical music and beyond. Like Jarrett, Garbarek’s relationship with the label, and the visionary Eicher, has been symbiotic, with all his releases since “Afric Pepperbird” being on ECM. Similarly to Jarrett, whose 1975 “Köln Concert” became the best-selling solo piano album of all time, Garbarek also later achieved significant crossover success on ECM, when his 1994 album “Officium” achieved sales of over 1.5 million.
Even in complex music, ECM releases always feel like they have a great sense of space; a space to focus on texture, nuance, beauty and emotion over density of notes. “Afric Pepperbird” somehow channels a burning intensity through this sense of space and creates something new and different that set a path for both Garbarek and ECM.
NB: quotes are taken from “ECM: A Cultural Archaeology” (ed. Okwui Enwezor & Markus Meuller) and “Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM” by Steve Lake & Paul Griffiths
Read on…Kenny Wheeler – Gnu High
Jon Opstad is a London-based composer working across film & television, contemporary dance, concert music and album projects. His scores include the Netflix hits Bodies and Black Mirror, and Elisabeth Moss thriller The Veil, co-composed with Max Richter. An avid record collector, he has a particular affinity for the music of ECM.
Header image: Jan Garbarek. Photo: Roberto Masotti / ECM Records.