Jazz breaking news: In Praise of Dreams – Jan Garbarek at 65
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Jan Garbarek, who turns 65 tomorrow, has every claim to be the greatest European jazz musician since Django Reinhardt.
Like the great gypsy guitarist Garbarek’s appeal lies beyond the narrow confines of his key musical style, and seems somehow of the present and of the ancient past. He is both jazz and not jazz, capable of exciting classical music fans, the baby boom generation of rock fans, aficionados of his label ECM and the “nordic tone”, world music enthusiasts, and followers of John Coltrane, the bedrock of his sound.
Garbarek, born in the small town of Mysen in Norway on 4 March 1947, Garbarek’s Polish father Czesław was a former prisoner of war, his mother a Norwegian farmer’s daughter. The young Jan grew up in Oslo. Marrying early in his twenties his musical career was marked early on by a willingness to explore music from beyond Norway and indeed Europe. Although free jazz-orientated by the middle of the 1960s, Garbarek found himself at one point in 1965 playing with an Indian musician for a TV appearance, an early taster of the wider global music sampling possibilities to come, although his free thinking approach ran aground when the sitar player pointed out that what was being produced was contrary to the strictures of the raga. As Garbarek told composer Ivan Moody he was frustrated by the disciplines of a musical tradition, his attitude summed up by: “There are no wrong notes; I play what I want. It’s wrong for you, but not for me.” Garbarek developed his own approach inspired by among others the composer George Russell who he played with on Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature in 1969, admiring the challenges of improvising at times with just a few notes to conjure with.
Garbarek also managed to reach out to his father’s native homeland in Poland by attracting the attention of film composer Krzysztof Komeda who toured in Scandinavia in the 60s, and by playing at the Jazz Jamboree festival in Warsaw. Years later in the 1990s, after the fall of communism, Garbarek returned there with his long running quartet of the time (pianist Rainer Bruninghaus, bassist Eberhard Weber and percussionist Marilyn Mazur) in a titanic performance that some Poles saw at the time as nothing short of a symphony.
The ECM label began in 1969 with the release of Mal Waldron’s Free At Last but along with Keith Jarrett, whose European quartet Garbarek would become a key member of, the Norwegian’s links with the label go back so far as to be almost indistinguishable from it. As a muse to Manfred Eicher’s Nordic vision, sculpted around folk music, ancient myths, earth mysticism and music as a function and manifestation of landscape, Garbarek with Jarrett, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen on Belonging, My Song, Personal Mountains and Nude Ants laid down some of the key component parts of what ECM was all about and hinted at Garbarek’s deeper vision, something that translated across the Atlantic, for instance when Steely Dan took the song ‘Long As You Know You’re Living Yours’ (from Belonging) and turned it into ‘Gaucho’ the process of interpreting both Jarrett and Garbarek however controversial was the reverse of the usual way of jazz, here crossing the Atlantic from Europe.
Garbarek has collaborated with a great many musicians from very different disciplines, and yet there is something he brings to all music, whether from a European, American or Indian background. It’s that plaintive remoteness that somehow connects with emotion, imbuing it with a kind of historical perspective that the long, airy lines conjure up, the primeval beckoning that seems to come from the core of his saxophone.
Texturally distinctive and although brought up on bebop and hard bop, Garbarek somehow connects with many musical styles partly through the meditative feel of his compositions, the beautiful tone and visceral power he conveys, and the improvisational intuitiveness that comes with his every intent. New Age, he may be at times, but this like so many cultural explorers of his generation is part of the journey. It could even be said to be a journey to silence. Garbarek’s work with Trilok Gurtu for instance manages to harness all within its reach past and present, as if picking up from Coltrane’s own Eastern explorations the baton of experimentation.
In the 1990s Garbarek became synonymous with a new take on early church music in collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble with Officium becoming the atmospheric signature album of a movement that briefly spanned the divide of classical, jazz and popular music drawing on the unlikely source of Gregorian chant. Later albums followed, and Garbarek with the Hilliards have taken the music into many of the great cathedrals of Europe and beyond.
When one of the most ambitious and successful of large scale art projects dawned with the opening of Tate Modern in London as the new millennium beckoned, the recorded music of Officium floated mysteriously across the Thames caught live on TV at the special opening, drawing together centuries of music making and the ancient waters of the river in a simple but devastatingly effective synthesis. Garbarek had managed to reach out to an audience that like Django Reinhardt before him saw music as a living language, and part of the rhythm of life, a process he celebrates and we with him to this day.
– Stephen Graham