ECM Editions: Even The Price Sounds Great!

ECM Editions: Even The Price Sounds Great! is a 1991 promotional jazz sampler CD released by Polygram Records to showcase artists from the prestigious ECM Records catalogue. Conceived as an affordable point of entry, it occupies an eccentric corner of the label’s history, somewhere between commercial bait and unauthorized cartography. The ridiculous cover and bargain-bin title seem almost calculated to puncture ECM’s reputation for austere visual refinement. Stranger still, seven of its 15 tracks are excerpts, a practice that feels almost sacrilegious when applied to music whose internal proportions often depend upon patience, suspended time, and the gradual disclosure of space. The track selection follows no discernible logic, while the sequencing appears to have been assembled by instinct rather than argument. Yet this lack of design becomes the compilation’s secret weapon. Doors open onto rooms that should not adjoin. Corridors change material halfway through. A staircase rises…