The double album Sleeper contains a previously unreleased live concert by Keith Jarrett's European quartet from the '70s, recorded at Tokyo's Nakano Sun Plaza on April 16, 1979. Together with saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson, and drummer Jon Christensen, Jarrett performs seven of his own compositions: "Personal Mountains," "Innocence," "So Tender," "Oasis," "Chant of the Soil," "Prism," and "New Dance" the latter song being the shortest here at seven minutes, while "Oasis" clocks in at over 28 minutes!

Recorded in 2001 live at the State Opera House in Munich, Out of Towners features the Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Jack DeJohnette trio in the kind of performance we've come to expect from them these last 21 years: Stellar. Being one of contemporary jazz's longest-running bands has its advantages; one of them is having nothing to prove. First and foremost, this band plays standards like no one else.

On this recording of The Seven Words, the Rosamunde String Quartet offers a compelling rendition of one of Haydn's most complex compositions. The Seven Words was originally composed for a full orchestra as a series of seven adagios, which were meant to be interludes during a congregation's meditations on the last seven words of Christ on the Cross. Haydn struggled with a way to compose seven connected pieces of music that were solemn and yet varied enough to keep the listener from getting bored. The members of the Rosamunde Quartet are technically brilliant as they demonstrate the composer's solutions to this musical puzzle. Even though the tempo is slow, they never let the music become ponderous or oppressive. But to Haydn, The Seven Words was more than just an aural conundrum. He felt the composition was perhaps his most sacred work, and the quartet plays this music with reverence for the composer's spiritual intentions. This is a profound piece of music, and the Rosamunde does it justice on each of its many levels.

It might be tempting to dismiss this Ralph Towner effort as New Age fluff, but the music is so gorgeous that any such considerations fall to the wayside. Yet the wayside is precisely where Towner sets his sights, which is to say that his interest lies in edges where musical idioms meet. He explores these lines, not unlike the blotted cover, with an ease of diction at the fret board that is recognizable and comforting. Drummer Peter Erskine shares the bill, but Towner adds a few synth touches for broader effect, as in “The Sigh,” which opens the session in a cleft of fluid energy.

If Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is simply described in terms of its materials and organization – 11 chords followed by 11 pieces built on those chords – then it might seem utterly dry and monotonous. The actual music, though, is far from lackluster. When this recording was released in 1978, the impact on the new music scene was immediate and overwhelming. Anyone who saw potential in minimalism and had hoped for a major breakthrough piece found it here. The beauty of its pulsing added-note harmonies and the sustained power and precision of the performance were the music's salient features; and instead of the sterile, electronic sound usually associated with minimalism, the music's warm resonance was a welcome change. Yet repeated listening brought out a subtle and important shift in Reich's conception: the patterns were no longer static repetitions moving in and out of phase with each other, but were now flexible units that grew organically and changed incrementally over the course of the work.

Anders Jormin’s new Swedish-Japanese project returns the highly distinctive voice of Lena Willemark to ECM – it’s her first appearance on the label in more than a decade - and introduces koto player Karin Nakagawa. In this trio music the Japanese classical tradition and the stark, archaic sounds of the koto, allied to Jormin’s powerful and subtle bass playing, form a unique context for Lena’s sung poems, delivered in her native Älvdals-dialect. Traditions and non-idiomatic improvising are cross-referenced and new paths opened up in these compositions.

Bassist and composer Anders Jormin has been one of the more restless and adventurous musical talents on the ECM roster. He's worked with numerous jazz talents from his long associations with Bobo Stenson, Charles Lloyd, and Tomasz Stanko, and from his composing for brass ensemble. This project is off the map. Commissioned to write new sacred music for premiere in the cathedral in Västerås, Switzerland, he composed a series of works in which he used the existing poems of Swedish writers like Harry Martinson, Johannes Ederfelt, Lotta Olsson-Anderberg, and the great Pär Lagerkvist, as well as those of William Blake.

Bassist Anders Jormin steps out with one of his projects, with an ensemble formed for the Swedish Jazz Celebration 2010. Anders sets his own lyrics – written in ancient Latin – and poetry of Denmark’s Pia Tafdrup for singers Mariam Wallentin and Erika Angell. Anders: “Latin seems to carry an almost magic ability to embrace and express whatever humanity has needed to communicate. The sense of eternity and mystery of this ancient language joined with the instantaneous presence and creativity of true improvisers became the inspiring framework in which the distinctive compositions came alive.” Improvisers on hand are the great Swedish free sax player Fredrik Ljungkvist and Jormin’s highly expressive partner from the Bobo Stenson Trio, drummer Jon Fält.

For her third ECM album, Israeli pianist Anat Fort augments her long-established trio – with bassist Gary Wang and drummer Roland Schneider – with a special guest: Italian reedman Gianluigi Trovesi. Fort and Trovesi have made a number of appearances together in recent years, to critical acclaim, and Birdwatching, with its lively, bright music, takes their rapport to the next level. There is an alertness and a joyful quality in the playing, both in the articulation of melodies and in the improvised passages. “I’d followed Gianluigi Trovesi on many records over the years,” says Anat, “and always loved his musical spirit.” Fort and Trovesi first played together in duo at Italy’s Novara Festival, after which Gianluigi came to Israel and participated for the first time in concerts with Anat’s trio at the Opera house in Tel-Aviv.

The legendary first lineup of Chick Corea's fusion band Return to Forever debuted on this classic album (titled after the group but credited to Corea), featuring Joe Farrell on soprano sax and flute, the Brazilian team of vocalist Flora Purim and drummer/percussionist Airto Moreira, and electric bass whiz Stanley Clarke. It wasn't actually released in the U.S. until 1975, which was why the group's second album, Light as a Feather, initially made the Return to Forever name. Nonetheless, Return to Forever is every bit as classic, using a similar blend of spacy electric-piano fusion and Brazilian and Latin rhythms. It's all very warm, light, and airy, like a soft breeze on a tropical beach – hardly the sort of firebrand approach to fusion that Miles Davis, Tony Williams, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra were exploring, and far less rooted in funk or rock.

Chick Corea's long, varied career resists a definitive summary on any one disc, so inevitably this Rarum volume is going to be limited by definition. Indeed, Corea compresses his choices further to only three of his many ensembles: the first Brazilian-charged edition of Return to Forever, his duets with vibraphonist Gary Burton, and the superb reunited 1980s trio with bassist Miroslav Vitous and drummer Roy Haynes (in any case, ECM promises a second Rarum volume of Corea chamber music in 2003). The present volume starts with a truncated version of the Return to Forever band's "Sometime Ago/La Fiesta" medley, the moody seven-minute intro lopped off perhaps to accommodate the limits of a CD that was pushing 80 minutes.

Tibbetts makes metallic folk music for disenfranchised folks. He's an elegant and multifaceted player, his compositions making use of exotic jungle rhythms (courtesy of longtime foil Marc Anderson), jazz-rock signatures, and regal European atmospheres. Tibbetts is one of the more idiosyncratic guitarists of the jazz/rock interface, with an uncanny ability to softly fondle his instrument yet rearrange its vocabulary to resemble nothing less than a sitar or tabla.

Steve Tibbetts is the thinking-man's guitar player whose music spans a host of influences – folk, jazz, rock, ethnic, modern classical – without being bound by any of them. Opening with a tabla-driven folksy cover of Led Zeppelin's "Black Mountain Slide," the album leads us through a collection of original pieces written by Tibbetts and his band members that are full of rich tone colors and inventive rhythms. His main instrument is acoustic guitar, but he also uses guitar synth, dobro, kalimba and something called a pianolin, while his colleagues add tabla, cello, steel drums and assorted percussion.

“My time with ECM is a lifetime by now,” Terje Rypdal notes, as he embarks upon his fourth decade with the label that has documented his far-reaching achievements as both improviser and composer. For this anthology, Rypdal chose to focus on his groundbreaking electric guitar artistry, heard in settings ranging from symphony orchestra to the enlightened hard rock of the Chasers. “Music must have colours and freedom”, Rypdal once said, and his selection here lacks neither.