Imagine the scene: You're in your seventh hour of practicing your instrument and you're ready for some nice wine and cheese, when the phone rings. It's Manfred Eicher from ECM, head of the world's most famous art music label, calling to say that he's kicking off a new series of anthologies. Not only does he want to give you a disc, but he wants you to pick the tunes. So you go to your record collection and dust off up to 30 years of old vinyl, and as you flip through possibly dozens of albums, you have to decide: Who are you? And what do you want to say about yourself?
Like the most well-adjusted guy at the high school reunion, Pat Metheny used his set to rattle off hit after hit and reminisce in the liner notes about all the good times he had, before leaving for a bigger label. Chick Corea left out his influential experimental work with Circle, while Keith Jarrett packed his set with material that he didn't think we paid enough attention to the first time, including a bunch of weird stuff with clavichord and recorders. And at the other end of the "look at me" spectrum from Jarrett, Bill Frisell included a piece that he didn't even write or perform on. No matter how strong the collections tend to be, no artistic or commercial logic-- no hard curatorial judgment-- guides what ends up on them, and that's both revealing and flawed.
German bassist and composer Eberhard Weber has worked with the ECM label almost since its founding. Weber performs on an electric, five-string bass of his own design, which produces a unique, almost rubbery, elongated tone, higher than usual for an upright and elastically melodic. Most of his major work came out on ECM, aside from one stint in pop music-- a few appearances with Kate Bush, who used Weber's distinct tone most notably on "Houdini." Nowadays, he tours with Jan Garbarek's group and has only cut two albums of his own in the last decade, most recently in 2001.
It's not surprising that Weber splits this album almost equally between sideman gigs and his own bands. But he doesn't explain why he skipped his only masterpiece-- his debut, The Colours of Chloe. One of ECM's earliest classics, Chloe still sounds unprecedented; the only albums I could compare it to are some of the dreamier fusion and prog music of the time from maybe Soft Machine, and its most childlike moments might appeal to fans of Boards of Canada. Weber, keyboardist Rainer Brüninghaus, and fluegelhornist Ack van Rooyen front a chorus of cellos, whose long, drowning tones evoke the feel of crumbling walls: From a European, it echoes the feeling of an old civilization growing older, of an almost epic weariness that threatens to drag down the entire group-- especially on "An Evening with Vincent Van Ritz", recently sampled-- and why don't more people sample ECM?-- by Prefuse 73, where they and the wordless, keening voice of Gisela Schäuble tug at Weber's feet.
Yet Weber soars across the solemnity, pulling high notes and elegiac melodies onto the foreground to mark the death of one generation with the emergence of another. On the slow "More Colours", Weber's bass yo-yos against the heavy silences. And the title song, still Weber's most famous piece, has a simple, sing-songy primary melody that Weber performs on the ocarina, evoking a peeking-over-the-crib revelation like an infant realizing for the first time that the sun rises and sets. And while the through-composed elements frame the album, the solos by Bruninghaus and (on "Van Ritz") van Rooyen are so perfectly formed that I can still recall them note for note.
Chloe remains Weber's most endearing work, not least because he's so obviously finding his way through the album; he recalls, in the liner notes to this collection, that he had to record the title song in two stages before he figured out how to make it work. Maybe he feels that the album was immature or too rough around the edges, because he doesn't include a single song from it.
Weber does tap his 70s work twice, with "Silent Feet", where Brüninghaus' extended piano solo takes off like horses at a shotgun blast, and "Fluid Rustle", which is nearly as enigmatic as the Chloe tracks. Weber builds the piece from a theme that could've been played by a five-year-old on a xylophone, then gives that theme to vibes virtuoso Gary Burton and reflects it through a hall of mirrors of overdubbed, wordless female vocals. Weber also includes some decently jazzy sideman gigs, including his vigorous accompaniment on Metheny's composition "The Whopper", named for Weber's favorite American sandwich.
But as Weber entered the 80s, he moved even further towards the neo-classical, largely composed music that he's making now, where the improvisation naps within a refined, chamber ensemble-like environment. Of a track from 1982, Weber writes in the liner notes, "For my favourite sequence on 'Maurizius' I have to wait 4 minutes and 16 seconds. I guess one has to be a musician to understand that." Actually, even teenagers know that "Stairway to Heaven" doesn't start with the guitar solo. But if the somewhat breathless lilt that hits halfway through the piece is worth waiting for, "Maurizius" mostly sounds limp and channeled, especially under the deathly peaceful reeds of Windham Hill artist Paul McCandless. Likewise, the final track, 2001's "French Diary", swells and paces like a soap opera-soundtrack. Weber actually sits this one out, so set on being a composer that he blows off his stature as one of ECM's greatest bass improvisers. The piece suffers without him.
"There is a great discrepancy between classical music and jazz in that classical music concentrates more on the tried-and-tested, while in jazz the focus is more on the experimental," writes Weber. "And favoring emotion and spontaneity, however superficial, some people-- critics included-- often lose sight of quality." He's got me there, because ECM's worst-- by which I mean, coziest-- music favors quality over invention. You can often learn the most about an artist, or a label, from his most boring recordings, because that's when the clichés and old habits come out. ECM has been typecast as gorgeous but complacent, and it's sometimes called the father of new age because it let slip all the tension and conflict that new age dispensed with entirely. So it fits that instead of reevaluating or, God forbid, judging these artists, these artist compilation discs would turn into souvenir-style recordings.
But does friendliness make great music? Weber makes a cogent case for how he got to his present work, but he doesn't make room for the pieces that don't fit. He's too busy polishing his epitaph to remember that some musicians make their best work when they don't sound like themselves-- when they wrestle with new ideas, instead of sinking into the same familiar, quality-controlled surroundings.
