Jan Garbarek

Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek has stood closer to ECM Records than any other musician except pianist Keith Jarrett since Afric Pepperbird appeared in 1970. On tenor and soprano, his tone carries a sharp edge while long, sustained notes frequently resemble cries; he consistently favors space and silence. Beyond jazz, he places his sound inside Norwegian and South American folk songs, improvisations drawn from medieval polyphony, and material from the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East. The 1974 album Witchi-Tai-To ranks among the strongest entries in the ECM catalog. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he featured several American guitarists: Bill Connors on Photo with Blue Sky…, John Abercrombie on Eventyr, Bill Frisell on Paths, Prints and Wayfarer, and David Torn on It's OK to Listen to the Gray Voice. From the 1990s onward collaborations outnumbered his solo projects, among them Ragas and Sagas with Ustad Fateh Ali Khan and the best-selling Officium with the Hilliard Ensemble, the first of four albums with the vocal group and a foundation stone of classical crossover. To mark thirty years with the label he released the double-disc Rites in 1998. The Hilliard Ensemble and Garbarek gave their final concerts in 2014; a recording from that tour, Remember Me, My Dear, appeared in 2019.

Born in Mysen, Norway, in 1947, Garbarek was the sole child of a Polish prisoner of war held during World War II and a Norwegian farmer’s daughter. He grew up in Oslo yet remained stateless for his first seven years, as automatic citizenship or approved residency was unavailable. At fourteen he heard John Coltrane on the radio and experienced an immediate revelation; he purchased a saxophone method book and mastered the fingerings before owning an instrument. Once he acquired one, progress came rapidly. By 1962 he had won an amateur jazz competition and started his own band. Awareness of Coltrane’s interest in Ravi Shankar led Garbarek to Indian music by 1963. From the Coltrane Quartet he absorbed lessons on leading a group, and Coltrane’s support for the freest voices of “the New Thing” directed his attention to Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and especially Albert Ayler. At the time Scandinavia attracted many American players; Garbarek heard and learned from Dexter Gordon, Ben Webster, and Johnny Griffin. In 1964 he performed with Don Cherry, whose integration of world folk elements into free jazz left a lasting mark. The most consequential relationship of those years was a four-year association with American composer and pianist George Russell. In 1969 Garbarek’s quartet, which included guitarist Terje Rypdal, bassist Arild Andersen, and drummer Jon Christensen, recorded an album produced by Russell. That same year Manfred Eicher invited the saxophonist to join the new ECM roster, and the landmark debut Afric Pepperbird was issued in 1970. George Russell Presents the Esoteric Circle came out on Bob Thiele’s Flying Dutchman label in 1971.

Garbarek also worked in the United States with Cherry and Jarrett during 1970. The following year he delivered his next ECM album, again with the original quartet but now augmented by pianist Bobo Stenson; the same lineup appeared on Rypdal’s first leader date for the label. In 1973 Garbarek issued the trio recording Triptykon with Andersen and drummer Edward Vesala. Over the next three years he participated in several Russell projects, including Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature and The Essence of George Russell, and joined Jarrett’s European quartet for its ECM debut, Belonging, in 1974. That same year the Jan Garbarek-Bobo Stenson Quartet, completed by Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen, recorded Witchi-Tai-To. Although planned as a Stenson trio date, Garbarek and Stenson had jammed informally at the 1973 Polish Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw, where the saxophonist had performed since 1966; the rapport led to a quartet. The album consisted almost entirely of covers by Jim Pepper, Carla Bley, Don Cherry, and Carlos Puebla, reaching both jazz listeners and college audiences worldwide. Afterward Garbarek recorded Red Lanta with Art Lande, Luminescence and Arbour Zena with Jarrett, and Solstice and Solstice/Sound and Shadows with Ralph Towner. The Stenson-Garbarek quartet followed with Dansere in 1976.

Dis appeared in 1977. On that set Garbarek played tenor and soprano saxophones plus wood flute, accompanied by Towner on twelve-string guitar and the sound of a windharp positioned on sea-facing cliffs so the wind itself entered the recording. The album marked a turning point, Garbarek’s first to adopt a more inward stance toward composition and improvisation. For the remainder of the decade he worked primarily as a sideman, appearing on Kenny Wheeler’s Deer Wan, Jarrett’s My Song, Bill Connors’s Of Mist and Melting, and Egberto Gismonti’s Sol Do Meio Dia. He also released two albums under his own name: Places in 1978 with drummer Jack DeJohnette, pianist John Taylor, and Connors, and Photo with Blue Sky, White Cloud, Wires, Windows and a Red Roof in 1979, the official debut of the Jan Garbarek Group.

As the 1980s began, the partnership with Gismonti produced two trio albums that also featured bassist Charlie Haden: Magico in 1980 and the charting Folk Songs in 1981. Paths, Prints, recorded with Bill Frisell, Eberhard Weber, and Christensen, was released in 1982. Further dates with cellist David Darling (Cycles) and bassist Gary Peacock (Voice from the Past: Paradigm) preceded the Jan Garbarek Group’s widely praised Wayfarer in 1983. Garbarek contributed centrally to L. Shankar’s Vision the next year. In 1985 he appeared on five albums, among them Shankar’s Song for Everyone, his own It’s OK to Listen to the Gray Voice (Torn’s first ECM appearance), and another Gismonti project for EMI, Trem Caipira. All Those Born with Wings, issued in 1987, was recorded entirely solo, with Garbarek performing on saxophones, flutes, percussion, stringed instruments, and keyboards. The following year he began his first collaboration with Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou and recorded with Peacock, Zakir Hussain, and Jarrett.

Garbarek opened the 1990s with multiple projects. I Took Up the Runes examined contemporary improvisational treatments of Scandinavian folk songs and included striking originals. Accompanied by pianist Rainer Brüninghaus, bassist Weber, drummer Manu Katché, percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, synthesist Bugge Wesseltoft, and vocalist Ingor Ánte Áilo Gaup, the album’s most noted track was a version of Mari Boine Persen’s Sami anthem “Gula Gula.” It also contained the five-part Molde Canticle suite. The next year he returned to a jazz setting with the trio album Star, featuring drummer Peter Erskine and bassist Miroslav Vitous. Early work with Karaindrou was reissued on her first ECM collection, Music for Films. In 1992 Garbarek appeared as soloist on his daughter Anja Garbarek’s debut, Velkommen Inn, and on his wife, author Vigdis Garbarek’s audiobook Stemmer. He also recorded Ragas and Sagas with Ustad Fateh Ali Khan and a group of Pakistani singers and musicians. In 1993 he released the duo album Atmos with Vitous and the Jan Garbarek Group’s acclaimed Twelve Moons, yet Officium with the Hilliard Ensemble proved transformative. The project combined the vocal group’s medieval polyphony with saxophone improvisations on material reaching back to the fourteenth century, attracting jazz, classical, ambient, and rock listeners alike. After the subsequent tour the album became a cornerstone of classical crossover. Following the 1996 collaboration Madar with Anouar Brahem and Shaukat Hussain, Garbarek returned to inward explorations on Visible World, this time with a selective ensemble. In 1997 he guested on the track “Night Prayers” from composer Giya Kancheli’s ECM breakthrough Caris Mere, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies with the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester. He closed the decade with his magnum opus, the double-length Rites, issued in 1998. Leading a quintet of Brüninghaus, Weber, drummer-percussionist Marilyn Mazur, and keyboardist-electronicist Wesseltoft, the album summed up Garbarek’s work to that point, paid tribute to Don Cherry, reworked his own “It’s OK to Listen to the Gray Voice” and “So Mild the Wind, So Meek the Water,” drew on world-music sources from Norway to India, included a setting for voices and saxophone of a Native American poem, and featured the surprise inclusion of Jansug Kakhidze’s “The Moon Over Mtatsminda,” sung by the composer with the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra.

For several years Garbarek appeared only on other artists’ recordings, among them Vitous’s celebrated Universal Syncopations, before issuing In Praise of Dreams in 2004. On that album he performed most of the instruments himself, joined only by violist Kim Kashkashian and drummer Manu Katché. The same year he contributed to pianist Tigran Mansurian and Kashkashian’s Monodia and to Katché’s Neighborhood in 2005 as well as his daughter Anja’s Briefly Shaking. In 2008 he was percussionist-drummer Mazur’s sole accompanist on her breakthrough Elixir. The following year ECM released the first live album by the Garbarek Group: the double-disc Dresden, presenting new and earlier material performed by a quartet with Katché, Brüninghaus, and bassist Yuri Daniel.

In 2010 Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble collaborated again on Officium Novum. Whereas the initial album drew on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources and Mnemosyne focused on more recent repertoire, this release centered on music of distinctly Eastern character, principally compositions written or adapted by Armenian composer Komitas Vardapet (1869–1935). Commercially more successful than its predecessors, the album ranked near the top of classical, jazz, and crossover charts. Two years later ECM issued several archival recordings featuring the saxophonist: the 1981 live performance by Gismonti, Garbarek, and Haden titled Magico: Carta de Amor, Sleeper from a 1979 Jarrett European-quartet concert, and Weber’s Résumé, drawn from live dates between 1990 and 2007. In 2013 the label released Karaindrou’s retrospective Concert in Athens, recorded in 2010, on which Garbarek appeared on more than half of the eighteen selections. He took part in the 2015 tribute to Weber, Hommage à Eberhard Weber, a live concert that also featured Pat Metheny, Gary Burton, Michael Gibbs, Scott Colley, the SWR Big Band, and others. He performed on Anja’s The Road Is Just a Surface in 2018. In 2019, as part of ECM’s fiftieth-anniversary observance and of Garbarek’s long association with the label, Remember Me, My Dear was released, a live recording from the 2014 farewell tour with the Hilliard Ensemble.