Looking ahead to ECM's 50th anniversary celebrations at the Royal Academy of Music

It was in December 2018 that Nick Smart, head of jazz at the Royal Academy of Music, was in Munich for a concert with the RAM big band. Around the same time he’d had an informal conversation with pianist Kit Downes about maybe doing something in London to celebrate the 50th birthday of ECM records, which actually fell in December 2019. Downes says: “The Academy and ECM have close links in many areas, and we both thought it could be an interesting way to celebrate the label to bring some of its musicians such as Craig Taborn and Anders Jormin to the Academy to work with the students.” So, while he was in Munich, Smart went off to meet the ECM team and the idea coalesced of bringing those very artists to the Academy for a week of workshops, recitals and full-scale concerts.

It will culminate in two nights of public events on 30 and 31 January, and the classical side of the label’s work will not be overlooked either, as these presentations include a masterclass from viola player Kim Kashkashian, who is a star of ECM’s New Series. That’s on Thursday 30, when Taborn and Jormin will also front a double-bill concert by student ensembles with whom they’ll have been working to create new music.

Downes himself is involved, as one of the newer recruits to the label. He told me: “I initially recorded for ECM on Thomas Strønen’s album Time is a Blind Guide, and it was on that session at Rainbow Studios in Oslo where I met Sun Chung and later ECM founder/producer Manfred Eicher (above top). We kept in touch afterwards about doing a solo record of some kind – which then became Obsidian – my solo pipe organ album. I’ve been listening to ECM recordings since I was first discovering jazz – Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert was my second jazz CD, after Night Train – so I feel extremely lucky to be making music for them. In fact, I’ve just released my second record with them as a leader – called Dreamlife of Debris – which features piano, organ, Tom Challenger on saxophone, Lucy Railton on cello, Stian Westerhus on guitar and Seb Rochford on drums.”

It won’t, however, be that group that appears in the London concerts, but Downes’ other current band, his trio Enemy, collaborating with strings. “This was originally a commission with the Riot Ensemble, a fantastic group that specialises in working with both classical musicians and musicians from other fields, such as improvisation,’ says Kit. “We performed the music twice last year, and decided to reimagine it for further performances with the Academy students – from both the classical and jazz courses.”

And Academy students will be a major part of the final concert on 31 January, when Norma Winstone will be appearing with the RAM big band. It is a celebration of what would have been ECM stalwart Kenny Wheeler’s 90th birthday this month, and the evening also involves those long-term members of Wheeler’s bands, Evan Parker and Stan Sulzmann. Nick Smart, who is currently working on a Wheeler biography, is thrilled that they’ll be playing some charts that haven’t been heard for years and which have been unearthed from the Academy’s archive, including an orchestral version of ‘Smatter’, predating its 1975 recording on the Gnu High album with the quartet including Keith Jarrett by a year. Smart points out: “This and a part of ‘Song for Someone’ – with a section that was not included in the recording – are from a relatively undocumented part of Kenny’s career. Yet that period in the early 1970s reveals him developing real vision for what would become his large ensemble concept. You can see him experimenting with more ambitious writing, including mixed metres and creating a context for free improvisation.”

As part of that collection of newly rediscovered music from Wheeler’s work, Norma Winstone is particularly keen to reprise her role as an ‘instrumental’ voice in the line-up. She says: “I always was, and still am, thrilled to sing the lines which Kenny wrote for me as part of his big band. It was a unique idea of his to make a voice part of the overall sound and I took to it like a duck to water! I learned so much about how to blend with the other instruments from experiencing his wonderful technique up close. His music is a joy to sing.”

The celebrations of the label’s 50th birthday are set to run throughout the year, but this week at the RAM will be a tremendous start for UK events marking the anniversary, and an inventive collaboration between a cross-section of its artists, from early signings like Evan Parker, Norma Winstone and Anders Jormin, to newer recruits such as Kit Downes and Craig Taborn.

The Royal Academy of Music’s ECM festival takes place on 30-31 January. For tickets and information: tickets.ram.ac.uk