Audiopile Review: ECM Records is commonly associated with chamber jazz heavy hitters like Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek. But if there’s one artist who best epitomizes the pristine widescreen beauty that ECM founder Manfred Eicher has championed for over half a century, it’s Estonian holy minimalist composer Arvo Pärt. And no record better epitomizes Pärt’s sound, which is equal parts tempestuous and contemplative, than 1984’s ‘Tabula Rasa’. Heck, it even features Keith Jarrett on the opening version of ‘Fratres’. It also features probably Pärt’s most well-known work, the truly phenomenal ‘Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten’. And that’s before you even get to the epic, two-part ‘Tabula Rasa’ itself. To celebrate the album’s 40th anniversary, Eicher is getting it back into print on vinyl. This is part of an incredible reissue streak, which has included classics from John Abercrombie and Azimuth, with an edition of Benny Maupin’s stratospheric ‘The Jewel in the Lotus’ still to come. That Eicher fellow does not mess around, so you can rest assured the new edition of ‘Tabula Rasa’ will sound as pristine, widescreen, and beautiful as you know it should.

In 1984, ECM brought a new sound into the musical world with the release of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa, the first album on the label’s New Series imprint. The record also marked the intersection of some of the most longstanding, significant musical collaborators in the label’s history: Arvo Pärt, Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett.

„The album that brought Pärt’s name to the West, and to the world (…). Back in 1984 Tabula rasa helped re-educate our ears and throw open the doors of our musical sensibilities to spatial domains that had otherwise been closed to us. This is without any shadow of a doubt one of the great recordings of the last century.“
– Rob Cowan, Gramophone (2023)