Manfred Eicher is a German record producer and the founder of the ECM record label and its subsidiaries. He founded ECM Records in 1969 and by the mid-1970s the label was well-known for its atmospheric and sparse settings which made strong use of silence, brilliant recording quality and a sort of jazz minimalism. Some of its records are fairly free while others use folk melodies as the basis for their improvisations. Eicher has often been willing to stretch the boundaries of jazz into World Music