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I blame it all on Eric Dolphy in Berlin (Inner City).   I had been collecting rock records since I was a teenager when, as a freshly minted college grad,  I ran across that Eric Dolphy record in a $1.99 bargain bin.   Within months I'd sold or traded most of my rock records to finance my decades-long exploration of jazz.  I'm now 67,  and just as thrilled to eavesdrop on the process of creation as I ever was.     I likely now have well over 5,000 jazz records, and while the pace of acquisition has slowed,  I still get that same kick out of discovering new sessions and new voices.   

Chick Corea's The Sun,  maybe the most intense set Corea ever recorded, featuring a blazing Steve Grossman.    I was pleased to acquire this in a trade yesterday for records by Bill Frisell and Fred Leeflang.  

I'd say that ECM was actually quite broad in all decades ... And it always had great American artists on the label... Pretty sure the biggest seller was Köln Concert...  Btw, three non-ECM albums that I played a lot recently is that trilogy of albums with Lee Konitz that Jakob Bro recorded before joining ECM... Imho, those are stronger "ECM albums" than the ones he actually recorded for the label... At least, I'd say that he had the ECM thing down before joining ECM

The Dick Morrissey Quartet - It's Morrissey, Man! [Fontana, UK 1961 mono]

That was what I was going for with my "anxiety over US influence" comment. But query why it is that whispery rhythm-less expansiveness is the sign of jazz continentalism. There are plenty of other more obvious European signifiers that they could have picked up on for European jazz: waltz time, brass band traditions and the European classical avantgarde might all have been more obvious contenders. The Nordic folk roots of Scandi jazz get talked up a lot but they can be hard to discern in the 1990s/2000s ECM era stuff.  I am always a little unsure about Johansson's actual musical influence on "European" jazz. He is talismanic, and he clearly led the way with the idea that jazz could and should have its own Nordic tradition (similar to Under Milk Wood for Brits), but I don't hear that much resemblance between Johansson and e.g. Tord G. I hear a likelier line of musical influence on the ECM stuff from Giuffre's experiments in removal of rhythm (particularly those European tour records), and Miles Davis' turn towards expansiveness. But fundamentally I think that Jan Garbarek was a just a big seller and, having had a hit, ECM started pumping out product in the same vein, like a more extreme version of every post-Sidewinder Blue Note record having to have at least two boogaloo tracks. Query whether it is right to even talk about a monolithic European jazz tradition. The legendary European records from the 60s and 70s draw on In A Silent Way, Gil Evans, Don Cherry, Stockhausen, dada, Motorik and Mothers of Invention. They're many things but they not whispery and rhythm-agnostic.