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Over the last four decades, jazz labels have buzzed with a flurry of inventive activity and thenseemingly overnight have fizzled in vitality and importance—silenced either by bankruptcy inthe case of independent endeavors or imprints being phased out of the new-release schedulesof major recording companies that crave fluff-like commercial “hits” and despise spirituallyattuned artistic “misses.” During this woefully sober upheaval in the jazz marketplace—no longer ananomaly but a given—there has been one constant of creative music commitment: the GermanybasedECM label founded and piloted by producer Manfred Eicher. Its credo is summed up quite succinctlyin the label’s 2009–’10 catalogue: “ECM has maintained the most old-fashioned of businesspractices while staying in tune with what is newest and most alive in music.”Launched in November 1969 with Mal Waldron’s album Free AtLast, ECM boasts more than 1,200 titles in its genre-resistant catalog,with a steady flow of 30 to 40 new releases each year, featuring bordercrossingjazz, improvisational music, transcultural collaborations andclassical (specifically in his ECM New Series, begun in 1984 to recordthe music of Arvo Pärt). With a track record of scoring million-sellinghits such as Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert and Jan Garbarek and theHilliard Ensemble’s Officium, ECM continues to forge ahead as theprime purveyor of the luminous art of jazz. For this pursuit of excellence,Eicher this year is honored with the DownBeat LifetimeAchievement Award, which recognizes his momentous—and unorthodox—contributionto the history of jazz.Eicher wrote in his “The Periphery and the Centre” essay in the bookHorizons Touched: The Music Of ECM, edited by Steve Lake and PaulGriffiths (Granta Books, London, 2007), that music—his passionatevocation—forms his life’s “essential core.” He noted: “The atmosphereproduced at a recording session should be inimitable and awaken thedesire to make changes or, when necessary, to improve and perfect ...[tocreate] an atmosphere that sincerely expresses what one wishes to conveyof oneself and one’s emotions. Music is the art that speaks directlyto the soul.”With ECM, which celebrates its 40th anniversary throughout 2010,this soul-stirring music is expressed in the image of Eicher, who is fullyimmersed in all aspects of the albums on his label, from the recordingand mixing to the careful attention to the artwork that adorns the covers.In New York last November at the conclusion of recording MeredithMonk’s latest album, Songs Of Ascension, Eicher settles into ECM’sManhattan offices for a conversation on his philosophy of music andthe evolution of the label. He’s a serious man, soft spoken and articulate,yet you sense that he feels much more at home in the studio thanbehind a desk fielding questions about his successes. Still, he possessesan agreeable demeanor, proud of the art he has created and still fullyengaged in discovering music that intrigues him. His empathy has notwaned, he insists.“Music is my driving force,” he says. “Music has no location and nonationality. In the early days of ECM, we recorded mostly American artists.Then for many years, I concentrated on Europeans in the North and then tothe East. Today I go to Greece and Spain. I go anywhere I have to to findmusic that interests me.”This exploration started early thanks to his mother’s passion for classicalmusic. She sang chamber music and treated Eicher—born in Lindau,Germany, in 1943—to a steady diet of Schubert, Schumann andBeethoven. While he wanted to learn the piano, he was forced to take violinlessons at the age of 6 because the house he grew up in wasn’t bigenough for even an upright. However, when he turned 14, he switched tobass after he heard Birth Of The Cool and followed Miles Davis’ thread towhen Paul Chambers held the bass chair. (A contrabass wouldn’t fit in theEicher family home, either, so he frequently practiced on one at theQuartier du Jazz in Lindau.) Even though he gravitated to jazz, Eicherstudied classical at the Academy of Music in Berlin. He commented in hisDOWNBEAT LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD1981 John Hammond1982 George Wein1983 Leonard Feather1984 Dr. Billy Taylor1985 Dr. Lawrence Berk1986 Orrin Keepnews1987 David Baker1988 John Conyers Jr.1989 Norman Granz1990 Rudy Van Gelder1991 Bill Cosby1992 Rich Matteson1993 Gunther Schuller1994 Marian McPartland1995 Willis Conover1996 Chuck Suber1997 Bill Gottlieb1998 Bruce Lundvall1999 Sheldon Meyer2000 George Avakian2001 Milt Gabler2002 Emilio Lyons2003 Joe Segal2004 Herman Leonard2005 Creed Taylor2006 Claude Nobs2007 Dan Morgenstern2010 Manfred EicherHorizons Touched essay that he was dedicated to mastering the bass andthat “it even looked as if I would spend my life in the back row of a symphonyorchestra.”But that wasn’t meant to be. He stopped playing in the BerlinPhilharmonic and moved to Munich. There he continued performing butalso became fascinated with the sonic possibilities of music productionwhile working as a program assistant for Deutsche Grammophon andother labels. It was during this time, as Horizons Touched co-author Lakerecounted in his introduction, that Eicher realized that “more care wasinvested in the recording of classical music than in … jazz. This was one‘injustice’ he could set about correcting, with an attention to detail thatKeith Jarrett would approvingly call ‘fanatical.’”Meanwhile, Eicher was buying records at a shop that also had a mailorderservice. He became friendly with the clerk, who suggested that heproduce his own music that he liked. Eicher took a gamble, plunked downDM 16,000 (the equivalent of $4,000) and contacted Waldron to record analbum that the pianist later commented on as representing his “meetingwith free-jazz.” ECM was born. “This wasn’t some idea that I had for along time. I didn’t have a plan,” Eicher says, with a laugh. “It was a spontaneousgesture. It took off. Overnight I needed to come up with a namefor my label, so I called it Edition of Contemporary Music. I had no experience.I was a musician and had been involved in music my whole life. Ihad some contacts with musicians in New York, so I reached out to themto make albums for me.”Important early U.S. musicians included Jarrett (he’s recorded exclusivelyon ECM since 1971), Chick Corea (beginning in 1971 and includingReturn To Forever), Gary Burton (beginning with his 1972 Corea duoalbum, Crystal Silence) and Dave Holland (beginning in 1971). Eicher’ssigning of Norwegian saxophonist Garbarek opened the door to ECM’sexplorations with several Scandinavian musicians (ushering in the socalledNordic sound that Eicher today scoffs at: “I’m so tired of this term.It’s so cliched. It’s nonsense.”). The breadth of the ECM catalog broadenedwith musicians from England (Evan Parker), Italy (Enrico Rava) andPoland (Tomasz Stanko). Burton has noted that ECM expanded his jazzvision because of the label’s documentation of important European improviserslargely unknown to American musicians and listeners.“But American music of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s was imprinted on ourmusical lives. That’s where our roots are.”May 2010 DOWNBEAT 43