Manfred Eicher speaks to music journalist Zachary Moldof in New York City. Here’s an archival interview with the great Manfred Eicher, founder of Edition of Contemporary Music aka […]
Art & Design: The Colours of Maja Weber (ECM)

For our next Art & Design in focus, we highlight the work of Maja Weber, wife of German bass icon Eberhard Weber.
Arguably the most iconic series of artwork in the vast ECM catalog, Maja Weber’s paintings in the ’70s for her husband Eberhard along with other ECM legends like John Abercrombie, Jack DeJohnette, Steve Kuhn, and Dave Holland were in many ways the perfect visual accompaniment to “the most beautiful sounds next to silence.”
Created using crayon, colored pencil, and watercolor, Maja’s paintings often depicted serene, natural scenes filled with life and color. Her style might be described as naive and sweet, almost childlike in the way the images embody a deep sense of wonder. Flowers and trees become larger than life, birds take on human characteristics, and fish drink water from the sky…

Even these simplistic environmental color studies she made for Bill Frisell’s 1983 album In Line have a certain quiet charm to them. Personally, the images really put me at ease staring into them while listening along to Frisell’s jazz-infused Americana.

Eberhard on his working relationship with Maja:
“She started to paint when we got married in 1968. I always liked her artwork. She has developed a lot if you compare my first album cover to my last one. There were big steps in between. Because I like her paintings, I never saw any reason why I should ask somebody else to do my artwork. She deserves it. We have been together for 33 years now. She paints 10 to 15 pieces a year. I have a lot of choice. I tell her which ones I like, but there have been situations where I wanted a painting and she said “No, no, no, no—no way!” [laughs] Then, of course, I have no choice and I take something else, after we discuss it. She likes my music and not just because she’s my wife. If it shows through the paintings, it’s fine. I’m not enough of an expert to say if her cover art is an invocation of an album.”
While the majority of Maja’s work was for ECM, she did step away from the label a few times through her career. In the late ’80s, she created two wonderful album covers for a Japanese group called Killing Time. It’s perhaps her most abstract work and matches the beautiful and strange musical world of Killing Time, who explored and mixed all kinds of genres from world music to neoclassical and minimal to progressive rock (Read a deep dive about the group on Fond / Sound). I’m not sure what creature is on the album cover below, but the humanoid birds on the inner jacket remind me quite a bit of Penguin Cafe Orchestra.


It’s hard to piece together the right words to describe the subtle beauty of these paintings, but I came across an old German blog post written by Michael Engelbrecht that I think nicely captures the magic of Maja Weber:
“The soundtrack of your life can easily be synchronized with album covers. There was a year when I listened to Desire, Zuma, and Yellow Fields in equal measure, and the covers became as unforgettable as the music while simply being there, “all the time“, in your room. Not that these covers were, on a regular basis, as stunning as the music, but, in the case of Maja Weber, I have really liked most of her covers for ECM records.

I still remember the first time I ever saw one of her paintings, on Eberhard Weber’s debut, The Colours of Chloe. I saw that album, the name of the artist, the shocking cover, shocking in its own peculiar ways: a family picture, utterly naive, flowers beyond any San Francisco hippie cult, a fairytale family in pastel shade. I think for some jazz “connoisseurs“ that must have been like a personal insult: nothing cool, nothing rebellious – and knowing from where Eberhard grew up, you could instantly think of a “schwäbische Musterfamilie“.
In fact, this album became a “jazz classic“ transporting the listener to a place beyond any trained fantasy of what a jazz record should be and look like. Wonderful, never losing its spell. And the second one was Yellow Fields, another stunner. Funny, most people who apparently know that cover very well simply oversee that one of the trees looks like a flower. And then came The Following Morning, highly addictive, ask Pat Metheny! Three masterpieces in a row. From time to time, Kate Bush is taking one of these records from the shelves and plays it. And there they are again, the good old vinyl covers.”
Below, more album covers from Maja Weber.







