Patrick Bruce Metheny is an American jazz guitarist and composer.
Stephan Micus is a German musician and composer, whose musical style is heavily influenced by his study of traditional instruments and musical techniques from Japan, India, South America, and other countries. With the exception of his album The Music of Stones (1989), he plays all the instruments on his recordings, combining styles from different countries and using the instruments in unprecedented ways in each of his pieces. He often uses layers of a single instrument to create unusual combinations of sounds. He is one of the few ECM Records artists whose records are not produced by Manfred Eicher. He has mixed instruments from around the world, or used whatever was at hand: stones, ordinary flowerpots tuned with water, and his voice—singing improvised syllables over ten years before others made this approach fashionable.
Athos is an album by Stephan Micus recorded between November 1993 – February 1994 and released on ECM in 1994.
ECM is an independent record label founded by Karl Egger, Manfred Eicher and Manfred Scheffner in Munich in 1969. While ECM is best known for jazz music, the label has released a variety of recordings, and ECM's artists often refuse to acknowledge boundaries between genres. ECM's motto is "the most beautiful sound next to silence", taken from a 1971 review of ECM releases in Coda, a Canadian jazz magazine.
The pedal steel guitar is a console-type of steel guitar with pedals and knee levers that change the pitch of certain strings to enable playing more varied and complex music than other steel guitar designs. Like all steel guitars, it can play unlimited glissandi and deep vibrati—characteristics it shares with the human voice. Pedal steel is most commonly associated with Country music and Hawaiian music.
David Holland is an English double bassist, bass guitarist, cellist, composer and bandleader who has been performing and recording for five decades. He has lived in the United States since the early 1970s.
Shankar Lakshminarayana, better known as L. Shankar, is an Indian violinist, singer and composer who also goes by the stage name Shenkar. Known for his innovative contributions to world music, he is often regarded as one of the pioneers of East- West fusion, blending the rich traditions of Indian classical with Western genres such as jazz, rock, and electronic music. His world music albums with the band Shakti during the mid-70s became the ‘standard to gauge the playing and composing abilities of any world musician following in Shakti's expansive wake”. He is credited with inventing the stereophonic double violin (known as the LSD - L.Shankar Double Violin), which covers the orchestral string family's range. In 1990, Shankar's talam-bending Pancha Nadai Pallavi' album was on the Billboard top ten world music chart for three months becoming the first traditional Indian record to reach those heights. His 1995 Raga Abheri album was nominated for a Grammy Award, in the Best World Music Album category. With Peter Gabriel, he worked on the Grammy winning album Passion(1989), the soundtrack album for Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and wrote and performed vocals on Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' (2004) which won a Dove Award for Instrumental Album of the Year at the 36th GMA Dove Awards. He also worked on the soundtrack for the 2002 film Queen of the Damned with Jonathan Davis and Richard Gibbs and recorded eight songs of which five were picked for the movie. Additionally, he collaborated on the original score for NBC's hit TV series Heroes with Wendy & Lisa. As an acclaimed musician, Shankar is ranked as one of the top famous male violinists by Ranker and one amongst the greatest violinists of popular music by Digital Dream Door. His extensive body of work spans a wide spectrum of genres, encompassing vocal and instrumental compositions.
Steve Tibbetts is an American guitarist and composer. He views the recording studio as a tool for creating sounds. Most of his albums include percussionist Marc Anderson.
Egberto Amin Gismonti is a Brazilian composer, guitarist and pianist.
The Garden of Mirrors is an album by Stephan Micus recorded between 1995–1996 and released on ECM the following year.
Stephen Paul Motian was an American jazz drummer, percussionist, and composer. Motian played an important role in freeing jazz drummers from strict time-keeping duties.
Ralph Towner is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger and bandleader. He plays the twelve-string guitar, classical guitar, piano, synthesizer, percussion, trumpet and French horn.
Michael Mantler is an Austrian avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer of contemporary music.
Bill Connors is an American jazz guitarist who was a member of Chick Corea's band Return to Forever. After leaving Return to Forever, he recorded three acoustic albums and then three electric albums as a leader/soloist.
Vijay Iyer is an American composer, pianist, bandleader, producer and writer based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, where he was jointly appointed in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.
Ocean is a solo album by German composer and multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus recorded in January 1986 and released on ECM later that year.
Fleuve is the second album credited to the Pierre Favre Ensemble, recorded in Switzerland in October 2005 and released on ECM October the following year—twenty two years after the ensemble's 1984 debut, Singing Drums, presenting a new line-up that departed from the previous incarnation's all-percussion sound. The septet now included harp, double clarinet, double bass, tuba, guitar, bass guitar, soprano saxophone, and serpent—an instrument rarely used in jazz.
Twilight Fields is an album by German multi-instrumentalist and composer Stephan Micus recorded in November 1987 and released on ECM the following year.
Daylight Ghosts is an album by Craig Taborn, with Chris Speed, Chris Lightcap, and Dave King. It was released by ECM Records in 2017.
Far from Over is a studio album by the Vijay Iyer Sextet recorded in April 2017 and released on ECM August that same year. The sextet features brass section Graham Haynes, Steve Lehman and Mark Shim and rhythm section Stephan Crump and Tyshawn Sorey.
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