With its release on iTunes and other digital portals, my review of ECM - Selected Signs III - VIII, republished today at All About Jazz.

When München's Haus der Kunst sponsored a nearly three-month exhibition about the ECM Records label, ECM: A Cultural Archeology, which ran from November, 2012 to February, 2013, there was far more to it than just bringing together collections of album covers, rarely seen video, archival tapes, imagery and concert performances. As much as ECM has carved a niche for itself as a label concerned about the whole package, including quality of sound, design and artwork, it is, after all, a record label, and one that has, in a history now spanning more than forty years, emerged as a singular, inimitable entity for its approach to the music it produces. ECM may not be for everyone—and is most certainly criticized by those who often try to pigeonhole a label whose discography makes it, in almost every way, unquantifiable—but it's the only label that has lasted this long where its fans regularly purchase music about which they are completely unfamiliar, for the sole reason that if it's on ECM, it's, at the very least, worth a listen. And, more often than not, even if it doesn't instantly resonate, there is usually something that makes the music worth revisiting until it ultimately does. The label's music is oftentimes about patience and, most importantly, an equilateral triangle of trust: between the label and its artists; the artists and their fans; and the label and its fans.

With label head Manfred Eicher producing the lion's share of its 1,200+ recordings, and involved, to some degree, with virtually every album that's been released, starting in 1969 with Mal Waldron Trio's Free at Last through to recent albums like Craig Taborn Trio's Chants[/url] (2013), Gary Peacock and Marilyn Crispell's Azure[/url] (2013), and Quercus[/url] (2013)—a particularly stunning nexus of traditional British folk music and freer improvisational concerns—there's a certain aesthetic that many have unsuccessfully tried to quantify, but which simply boils down to one thing: Eicher is that rare beast, an active producer who gets his hands dirty and is a full participant in the creative process. There may be other active producers out there, but none who have, by also running a record label now in its 44th year, not only changed the way music is experienced and heard, but regularly and consistently challenged preconceptions, pushed envelopes and burst through artificial musical and cultural delineators.

Along with a new book, with the same title as the exhibition—published by Prestel Verlag in 2012 in both English and German—Selected Signs III-VIII continues a series of ECM samplers that began in 1997 with its first volume, but in this case ties directly into the exhibition, allowing those who were unable to attend to at least experience one aspect of it. These six CDs—housed in a suitably austere white box and containing nearly seven hours and twenty minutes of music that spans much of the label's history—are playlists that Eicher himself programmed for the exhibition's numerous listening stations and small alcoves, where it was possible to sit on a bench at the end of a small, dark room and become immersed in some of the ECM's finer recordings, delivered through superb, high-end sound systems.

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