Just Music

Another album that proves that in the 1970s, ECM were a much broader church than the sterile landscapes the label tends to produce these days. Just Music was an outfit headed by the iconoclast’s iconoclast, Alfred Harth; the music here is creaky, unalloyed, full of surprising pivots and shattering dynamics, though a good deal of the music is also given over to muted abstractions that weave intricate threads of cellos and double bass as a hammock for disruptive blurts of trombone, tenor saxophone and clarinet, while Thomas Cremer’s drums regularly rouse the music from its slumber.