the joys of ECM records...

"In his biography of Jarrett, Ian Carr explains that the pianist spent much of the gig vamping, just waiting for the others to come in. In this vacancy, Carr claims, can be heard the imminent disintegration of the group. Well, I was happy to wait indefinitely, the longer the better in fact, because the infinitely prolonged suspense makes the climactic reintegration of the group—with just five minutes of the second side left to run—all the more intense. And the waiting, in any case, never felt like waiting; it felt like being where you wanted to be, never wanting to leave, but still curious to know who else might turn up, what else might happen. I never have this feeling when the Jarrett-Peacock-DeJohnette trio play standards, but I get it every moment when they play those surging, tidal originals: "Sun Prayer," "Dancing," "Endless," "Lifeline," "Desert Sun," "The Cure." Except that's not quite true, because the greatest moments of all occur when a standard turns into a Jarrett original, when "I Fall in Love Too Easily" smoulders into "The Fire Within" (on the fourth CD of At the Blue Note). These transitions express in miniature the larger contribution of ECM to musical history, as the accumulated riches of a tradition give way to something that lies beyond it, new, but waiting to be discovered. At the risk of projecting a listener's response onto the music's creators, it seems to me that an unspoken assumption underwrites many of the most successful ECM recordings: namely, that by the late twentieth century you could only make jazz if you were simultaneously trying to find a way out of it..."