Music With 58 Musicians, Volume One (ECM PRO-A-850)

Music With 58 Musicians may be the ultimate ECM compilation because it reveals the hidden principle that gave the label’s catalogue coherence from the very beginning. Released in 1980 and curated by Robert Hurwitz and Steve Lake, it arrived just after ECM entered its second decade, when its identity was recognizable yet fluid enough to resist canonization. Lake’s introductory note rebukes “less-informed critics” who interpreted ECM’s unusual personnel combinations as arbitrary whimsy, when in fact many pairings arose from touring, friendship, and the slow magnetic process by which compatible imaginations discover one another. As Jan Garbarek had already once explained in an interview for DownBeat, such sessions were less contrived than inevitable. The studio did not invent affinity but rather concentrated it to the point of audibility. The compilation at hand concerns collective playing more than individual display. Its musicians move between written composition and spontaneous…