Deutsche Grammophon

ECM

Founded by producer Manfred Eicher in 1969, ECM soon established an early reputation with standard-setting jazz recordings by artists such as Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, before expanding the program to include contemporary compositions in the late 1970s. The ECM New Series was launched in 1984, originally to introduce Arvo Pärt’s “Tabula Rasa”, and has since become a broad platform for a wide variety of composed music from the pre-baroque era to the present day. Eicher’s own background, as a musician active in both jazz and classical music, provided an unusually broad vantage point from which to survey the genres, and the producer has been credited with helping to bring form to improvised music and a sense of ‘improvisational’ flexibility to recordings of contemporary composition.