Eicher trained as a double bassist and studied in Berlin and Munich before landing a job at Deutsche Grammophon. That classical background matters. When he founded ECM in 1969 with a small amount of borrowed money, he was thinking about jazz the way a classical producer might — obsessing over acoustics, silence, reverb, the physical space a recording inhabits. His very first release was a piano trio record by Mal Waldron, and you can already hear it: the room is part of the music.

The label's early years pulled in musicians who didn't quite fit anywhere else. Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Paul Bley — people doing something introspective and open-ended that American labels in the early seventies weren't especially interested in promoting. Eicher gave them long recording sessions, premium studio time, and the kind of patient attention that let albums like The Köln Concert (1975) become what they became. That record, arguably the best-selling solo piano album in jazz history, happened largely because Eicher trusted Jarrett enough to document an improvised performance on a faulty piano in front of a late-night audience.

The ECM sound gets described as cold or austere, and fair enough — there's a lot of space, a lot of reverb, a lot of Nordic winter in there. But Eicher's aesthetic was never about emptiness for its own sake. He was after clarity. He wanted each instrument to be fully audible, fully present, and he was willing to lose the grit and dirt of a live room to get it. Some people find the result pristine to the point of feeling antiseptic. Others find it revelatory. The debate is genuinely interesting and worth having.

His production partnership with Jan Garbarek is probably the most sustained example of what he was going for. Over decades of records, that saxophone sound — wide, airy, hovering somewhere between jazz and folk music from places you can't quite name — became ECM's unofficial emblem. Garbarek (I Took Up the Runes) (1990) sounds like it was recorded inside a glacier and somehow that's not a complaint. Eicher understood that Garbarek's playing needed room or it would collapse into prettiness. He gave it room.

What Eicher actually did was create a viable alternative to the American mainstream at a moment when jazz was splintering in a dozen directions at once. He wasn't trying to compete with Blue Note or Impulse — he was building something parallel, with different priorities and a different idea of what a record could be. Whether you love ECM or find it too tasteful, you have to acknowledge that he built something coherent and kept it coherent for over fifty years, which almost nobody manages. That's not a small thing.