The producer is the musician in the background, and there need to be trust between all of these people. If you like the sound of ECM and have the chance to, one will work with Manfred Eicher and love it. But in a smaller environment, some musician colleagues or sound engineers are “producing” a record. I guess the whole job “producer” disappeared at the same time as the recording procedure became easier and cheaper.

There is a newly made documentation about Karajan, presented a couple of months ago. It shows a lot of his recording with Berlin Phils. Simply amazing how much time they had to work on one record, how many people were involved off stage. And of course there were always at least one producer!

And here comes the producer point. We at col legno desperately try to influence our artists and recordings as much as we can. But at the end of the day you crash into today’s economic reality and have to align your time and efforts very carefully.

Unless we find a way to earn enough money back to make our living, the way of producing you describe above is more and more disappearing.

As a label, beside the “producer role”, we offer two aspects to both musicians and the audience: our trusted choice of extraordinary music, and an unique way of presenting it.

In jazz most people are their own producers. Some do a great job of it, some perhaps not so much. It’s true many could be helped by a producer – but only if it’s the right one. And those seem to be fewer and fewer and farther and father between! Perhaps because the field is getting inundated with well-meaning amateurs…just like journalism. ;-)