This month, author Stuart Nicholson talks to Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek about his music and looks back over his long and varied career as Garbarek embarks on a mini-tour of the UK and Ireland.
By most people’s standards, saxophonist Jan Garbarek today stands as a major figure in jazz. Yet it is something he has achieved in the most low-key manner imaginable. For a start, his record company ECM, with whom he has been associated since September 1970, is not given to hyperbole or shouting his name from the rooftops, while Garbarek himself studiously avoids the spotlight whenever he can. He seldom gives interviews and likes to escape from his Oslo apartment to the Norwegian countryside as often as he can to work on his music, read poetry and enjoy the rawness of nature near the Northern Lights. Any kind of success, you sense, is the slightly unwanted side effect of making recordings, something he doesn’t seek but reluctantly puts up with, like standing in line at airports to have his baggage checked by x-ray machines.
Ever the quiet revolutionary, Garbarek has been described as a poet of sound, and his saxophone solos have the ability to transport the subconscious to areas of thought that are mystically and even aesthetically beckoning. Creating an evocative tranquillity strongly rooted in Nordic and European folkloric forms, his saxophone tone emerges as the main expressive force in his music. It has a haunting spirituality that often takes on a second life, a life within memory, and certainly many of his albums are truly memorable. Unconcerned with those who claim his music may or may not be jazz, he says, “What I’m playing today – whatever it is – I’m playing because I once learned the language of jazz. What I’m playing now I could not play without that fundament.”
Although he has been described as “the most original voice in European jazz since Django Reinhardt” by none other than the jazz composer and theorist George Russell, Garbarek prefers to call himself “the reluctant saxophonist”, even though his albums sell in five and six figure sums. His influence can be heard in countless contemporary saxophone players, from the late Michael Brecker to the UK’s Tommy Smith and Andy Sheppard. His recordings have virtually defined Scandinavian jazz for two generations of jazz lovers, while his collaboration with pianist Keith Jarrett in the 1970s – according to Jarrett’s biographer Ian Carr – took “the art of classic jazz to its highest pinnacle”.
Jan Garbarek Group ‘The Reluctant Saxophonist’ Dresden (ECM 2100)
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In more recent times, with album sales suffering across the board through internet downloads, Garbarek has successfully bucked the trend with sales of over a million units for his album Officium, which even appeared on the pop charts in several European countries. Recorded with the Hilliard Ensemble, the UK’s leading early music vocal ensemble, their association was described by The Guardian as “a major musical event” and by Time Out as Garbarek’s most “ambitious and emphatic artistic statement to date”. While every tour and recording by Garbarek creates a buzz of anticipation in the jazz world, his tours with the Hilliard Ensemble are embraced as much by jazz fans as those beyond the normal jazz constituency. Already his current tour with the a cappella vocalists is a sell-out, with their four rare dates in the UK this month seeing tickets snapped up as if it were a World Cup Final.
Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard Ensemble ‘Parce Mihi Domine’ Officium (ECM 1525)
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Garbarek, who was born in Mysen on 4 March 1947, is the son of a Polish father Czesław Garbarek, who had been deported by the Nazis in World War II as forced labour to work on the infamous ‘Blood Road’ in the north of the country. After the war he married a Norwegian farm girl, making Jan effectively stateless until the age of seven (there was no automatic grant of citizenship in Norway at that time). The family moved to Oslo, where Jan was brought up and in 1961, the 14 year-old heard John Coltrane’s Countdown by chance on the radio show Jazz Half-Hour and his life was changed forever. He obtained a saxophone and studied Coltrane assiduously.
“I then became interested in musicians Coltrane endorsed,” he recalls. “People like Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and when I started picking up things from them, I could play just like them. I used to play their tunes, I thought I came pretty close. At the same time I learned that Archie Shepp was influenced by Ben Webster and I thought, ‘OK. I’ll have to hear Ben Webster’, and from there I reached Coleman Hawkins. Then I realised there was a lot to learn from the older players, and I started unravelling the whole history of jazz saxophone playing. I did have this blessing, or to the contrary – I don’t know! – but without really thinking about it I could sound very similar to these players.
“One big influence on me was Dexter Gordon, who was living in Denmark at the time and a frequent visitor to Norway, where he played with the same musicians I played with – the rhythm section – so I got to hear him a lot. At this time he was really amazing, he was on top form in the 1960s, and there were some experiences that were mind blowing! That greatly influenced my playing to the point where somebody said I played more Dexter than Dexter himself, which tells you something of my youthful enthusiasm. A great, great player and I learned a lot from him and since he used to play standards, I used to play them too – so I’m not totally ignorant of that area of music – it’s just [standards] have never been my great interest.”
A rare glimpse of the teenage Garbarek during this formative stage in his development is apparent from a rare broadcast on Norwegian radio from the Molde Jazz Festival in 1965. Here, the 18 year-old demonstrates a formidable mastery of the hard bop style derived from Gordon that can only be described as stunning. “That broadcast I made – well, we were two young musicians, a young trumpet player and myself, who were invited to play with this ‘dream trio’ [Kenny Drew on piano, Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass and Axel Reil on drums], that used to back the American soloists at the festival,” he recalls. “This time two young Norwegian musicians would be allowed to play with them, so we had to play in their style to play the material, the hard bop style. But we were also doing very free stuff also. Til Vigdis in 1966, which was my first album [cut a year after the Molde concert], was a live thing also, and there is a piece there, the title piece, which shows more of what I was into at this point in the 1960s – that’s a very free, atmospheric thing and not this kind of finger-snapping hard bop thing.”
While Garbarek was able to convincingly play in the hard bop style – “For a while I was even shaking my legs like Dexter, and my wife said ‘Don’t do that, it looks silly!’” – and had absorbed Coltrane and free jazz masters like Ayler and Sanders, he became conscious that to find his place in the music he should develop a sound and approach of his own.
“At some point in the late 1960s while improvising, it frequently came to me that the phrases I played, some were by Dexter [Gordon] and the next minute it might be by Coltrane or whoever and I made the connection when playing that this was not right. I thought I should be trying to find something more personal rather than picking out random phrases by different people – if the piano player played some chords that reminded me of Coltrane, I would play a Coltrane phrase, if it reminded me of someone else I would play that saxophone in there. But suddenly I became very conscious of this ‘knee bending’ thing, I was very much aware of it and I didn’t feel the urge to play like that any more. I tried to find something more original, something more me, and as I played there wasn’t much me there at all! But at the same time I had listened to Miles Davis a lot, and I realised that when Miles played there was a lot of space, he didn’t play all the time like Coltrane did, and as he played there was room for other things to go on, and I thought that’s a really good clue.
“If you harness what’s there in the musical surroundings, in the moment, you cannot go wrong with that, you go wrong if you try and force something which doesn’t belong there. But if you find inspiration from what is there and you try and pick up things from your fellow musicians at the time, maybe something else will come out that is more ‘you’ and more related to the piece that you’re playing. So what I did felt more related to what I thought the piece was about – what I thought the piece was about – and I realised I didn’t have to play a million notes; it should be relevant to what the other musicians were doing so something emerged that was more me, so that’s as far as I would go for my own individuality, I guess. The crucial moment when I realised ‘knee bending’ wasn’t me!”
In an interview for this website, Garbarek attributes the formation of his style to listening and learning to the musicians with whom he’s performed. “That’s exactly what my music is,” he explains. “It’s what I learn from my fellow musicians, it was always like that, I had the great fortune of playing with some real masters – in my opinion – and very strong personalities, and I try and learn from all these musicians and I suppose in that big ‘mess’ something is growing slowly, still growing I hope, and whatever comes in will come out in another form or shape at some point, so I’m just very grateful for all the input of all these musicians.” After absorbing the influence of Dexter Gordon at first hand, he encountered another major figure in his development in the American composer and theorist George Russell, then resident in Sweden, who proved to be a pivotal figure in the evolution of Scandinavian jazz in general and Garbarek’s burgeoning career in particular. Their first meeting took place during an after-hours jam session at the 1965 Molde Jazz Festival.
Garbarek continues the story: “After my concert I was playing one of those jam sessions and as was my custom I was playing with my eyes closed. Suddenly it was like an explosion behind me on stage, I can’t really describe it much differently, a huge jump in the level of energy on stage. I realised something must have happened but I just went with it and blew my head off and after I finished my playing I turned around and saw that George was playing piano. He was playing in a not conventional way, he was playing with his elbows, the back of his hand, very rhythmic and very high energy stuff but very good. Afterwards he talked to me and asked me if I would like to join him for a tour. But I was 17; obviously I was still in school so no chance of that at all. But this was a very big event in my life, because here I was picked by an older and well respected international musician, I felt it was like an initiation in a way – I was accepted as a man in the tribe in a way! So that was very important, but also suddenly this possibility of working as a musician professionally. George told me he would keep in touch with me and that he would like me to go to Stockholm, where he was living at the time, and play on the radio, and sure enough after six months I got a letter inviting me to go to Stockholm, where he was recording with a big band.
“He knew, I had told him, that I could not read music so he sent me all the parts – not only what we were going to do there, but his whole repertoire – the saxophone parts – and I had three months to prepare myself. I certainly couldn’t have put in a bigger effort to master these parts and as it turned out, I barely survived. I came to Stockholm and I sat next to Bernt Rosengren [in the saxophone section of Russell’s big band] – one of my biggest heroes at the time next to Coltrane – and it was all quite awe inspiring! Afterwards I felt I had just about made it through without making a total disaster but I never saw such difficult music ever again, so you might say I learned the hard way!”
Garbarek’s debut with Russell was on the album called The Essence, and despite his self-effacing appraisal of his performance, Bernt Rosengren would recall later, “You could hear he was going to be special. He was so young, but he already had such good technique. And he was so free in his attitude: already a fine improviser and very open to different ways in music.” Garbarek immersed himself in Russell’s great theoretical contribution to jazz improvisation, The Lydian Chromatic Concept Of Tonal Organization, and later appeared on several of Russell’s recordings including The Essence Of George Russell (1966), Othello Ballet Suite (1967) and Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature (1968).
Another major event in Garbarek’s early musical development was in encountering the American trumpeter/pocket cornettist Don Cherry, whose influence on his playing would ultimately be greater than that of George Russell. It was Cherry who encouraged him to draw elements of his own Norwegian culture into his music.
“Don was a legend and he appeared here in Norway,” says Garbarek. “He used to live in southern Sweden – wearing very odd clothing! Playing all these strange, weird things, it was very shocking for us, but he was a very inspiring, very friendly man. Whenever he came to Norway he played with me and my colleagues here in Oslo. On one occasion we broadcast for Norwegian radio – the equivalent here [in Norway] of the BBC – we had a quartet and Don asked us if we knew any folk musicians here. We said certainly, we used to hang out with these people a lot but we had never played together. So we said we knew this singer, and brought her up to the studio and Don arranged everything, told everybody what to do and how to do it, and it was the most organic and natural link of free jazz inspired playing and Norwegian folk music. Perfect marriage, so that opened my eyes, and those of my colleagues’ too, about the possibilities which were very tangible; so after that moment this was a real option [for me], we now knew how it was done and it was really, really inspiring.”
In 1969, Manfred Eicher was in the process of setting up ECM Records and invited Garbarek to record for him. Afric Pepperbird was recorded in 1970, and proved to be the foundation of an international reputation for the saxophonist and his fellow band members, Terje Rypdal on guitar, Arild Andersen on bass and Jon Christensen on drums. Indeed, Scandinavian critics still refer to this group as ‘The Big Four’ – the players who defined the potential of Norwegian jazz. But the recording of Afric Pepperbird was nothing like the smooth, well planned operation we associate with ECM recordings of today.
“We started at ten o’clock in the evening,” recalled Jon Christensen. “In the middle of the studio was an elevator going up from the first floor to the studio, so every time we were going to record something Jan Erik [Kongshaug], the engineer, had to call down and say ‘OK, stop the elevator we’re recording now!’ So we did a couple of tunes and Terje Rypdal fell asleep! Besides the control room there was another little room, and in there was a big metal plate hanging, that was the echo machine and we had a very simple mixing board! When we recorded Afric Pepperbird Manfred was taking the train from Munich, and he stayed in Jan’s house or my house, to save money!”
Afric Pepperbird was an important moment in the evolution of European jazz, an album that followed in the steps of Krzysztof Komeda’s Astigmatic in projecting a specific European identity in jazz. “After we recorded it we knew we had something special,” reflected Manfred Eicher. “It was not in the way of American jazz, but was Scandinavian. The musicians play a different blues and it’s not of urban America. They have been brought up in different surroundings with a different music tradition. They know isolation and they know stillness and they know tranquillity because that is all around them.”
By now, Garbarek was well on his way to developing his distinctive ‘voice’ on saxophone, a focused blend of rhythmic power and reflective abstraction that also projected something of his Nordic psyche. Looking back on this period, he reflected: “Whether I like it or not, I am kind of locked into a certain vocabulary, phraseology, or whatever, that is linked to the Norwegian folk music I would say. Very hard to pinpoint; certain phrases, certain twists and turns that seem to represent that particular Norwegian flavour or approach that seems to pop up, even though I am not really looking for it any more. Now it stays with me, and whether I like it or not, it is there.”
With Garbarek’s album Triptykon from 1972, Cherry’s influence on Garbarek in incorporating elements of Norwegian folkloric material into his music emerged at its clearest to date: “Triptykon was the first time I used an actual Norwegian folk song, and from then on it’s always been there, that element in my playing,” says Garbarek. Meanwhile, the previous year ECM had begun another association that has lasted to this day, this time with pianist Keith Jarrett. In November 1971 Jarrett debuted on the label with Facing You, and in 1972 Eicher initiated the idea of a collaboration between Garbarek and Jarrett – whom Garbarek had met in the 1960s when Jarrett played in Oslo as a member of the Charles Lloyd Quartet – which resulted in a Jarrett composition for strings and saxophone called Luminessence (1974) and an album of the same name under Garbarek’s name, conducted by Mladen Gutesha, which was followed in 1975 by Arbour Zena.
Their debut together as instrumentalists came with Belonging, recorded in April 1974 with Palle Danielsson on bass and Jon Christensen on drums. What became known as Jarrett’s ‘European Quartet’ became one of the most influential groups in jazz of the last 30 years and continues to influence young musicians to this day; Ian Carr, Jarrett’s biographer, noting that Belonging delighted and stunned musicians, “because it seemed to open up new avenues for exploration, new approaches to ballad playing, new ways of combining freedom with coherence, fresh relationships between composition and improvisation.”
The group only recorded four albums for ECM, two in the studio: Belonging and My Song, and two live: Nude Ants and Personal Mountains. “My favourites are the studio albums,” says Garbarek. “I really enjoyed them, I thought both the live albums, unfortunately in my case, actually didn’t match what we did on a good night, so based on that knowledge of knowing what we could do I’ll go for the studio albums. Belonging, for instance, was very special in the studio, we just played one piece after the other, and we recorded the whole thing in less than two hours, one take after another, the quickest recording I’ve ever done. But of course the playing is really, really great. I was working with Keith until 1979, together with Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen. And then we had this quartet with Bobo, also with Palle and Jon, touring Europe and Scandinavia here, and with Keith we travelled to the States, we went to Japan and also around Europe – to a lesser extent.”
In 2002, in the liner notes for the compilation Jan Garbarek: Selected Recordings, Garbarek reflected on his association with Jarrett during this period, “[Playing with Jarrett] was a crucial time for me as a young musician to work so closely with someone as musically advanced as Keith, and I feel I benefited tremendously from it…I was more or less in awe the whole time, frankly not wanting to join in with what was going on between Keith, Palle and Jon, I just enjoyed listening to them so much!”
While Jarrett’s ‘European Quartet’ toured intermittently in the 1970s, Garbarek’s main working band during this period was the quartet he co-led with pianist Bobo Stenson, with Danielsson on bass and Christensen on drums, one of the most popular bands on the European circuit in the mid-1970s. It was an association that began by happenstance at a jazz festival in Poland in 1973. “I didn’t have a band with me, but I knew that Palle Danielsson would be there and Jon Christensen would be there, and I thought we could do something with the trio, just improvise something. Those were the free days, we just went on stage and played, but as it turned out Palle was there with Bobo [Stenson], and we thought it would be a good idea if we did a quartet.
“It felt very much like coming home, we all had the same background with Coltrane, Miles, everything that was around in those days, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, it was very fertile ground you might say; so when we started to play we sort of had a ‘code’, we knew what to do with each other, everything that came from one or other of the musicians we all knew how to respond. It was like putting on old, nice gloves. I think Bobo had a session coming up for ECM, and he said, ‘Let’s make it a quartet session, let’s do some of the stuff we did in Poland’. So we did this album called Witchi-Tai-To, and it was really Bobo’s project at the time, and then we decided to do live concerts and record some more together.
“That was pretty much it; the Sart album [from 1971, Garbarek’s first recording with Stenson] was a bit different, we weren’t really playing together on a regular basis then; we brought Bobo in as an ‘extra colour’ at that point. It was a different type of project, that was really a quartet with Terje Rypdal playing guitar, Arild Andersen [on bass], Jon [Christensen on drums] and myself. It was more like an experiment in the studio like we often did with ECM, trying to come up with something! It was not until later it became a band with Bobo, Palle, Jon and myself.” In addition to Witchi-Tai-To, the Jan Garbarek/Bobo Stenson quartet would go on to record Dansere (1976), both regarded as classics of European jazz.
By the end of the 1970s, Garbarek’s association with Jarrett came to an end, the pianist concentrating on solo concerts after the runaway success of his 1975 album Köln Concert, while Stenson left to join the experimental electro/acoustic band Rena Rama. In 1979, Garbarek made his first recording with the Jan Garbarek Group on the album of the same name (also known as Photo With…) which included Bill Connors on guitar, John Taylor on piano, Eberhard Weber on bass and Jon Christensen on drums. But this was essentially a studio group, “I didn’t know what to do at the time, I was a bit stuck,” confesses Garbarek. “But Eberhard [Weber] had done a duet concert with a guitarist called Bill Frisell and he had a recording of that. And I thought this is amazing, so we did some concerts with Bill Frisell, Eberhard Weber, Jon Christensen and myself. We toured a bit also with that band, and I thought it was really, really lovely – great music, great times. That was really important for me, but unfortunately Bill didn’t want to spend so much time in Europe, he wanted to move with his wife to the States again. So we lost him unfortunately, which was quite a blow for me. I really felt so much at home playing with him, so it was sad when he left, and left me hanging in a way; the band broke up.” Garbarek’s association with Frisell included Paths, Prints from 1982, Wayfarer from 1983.
After Frisell’s departure, Garbarek tried to continue The Group with other guitarists: “We went on for a bit with another wonderful player, but still not the same because the idea came from Bill at the time. David Torn, a very interesting player came in [which produced the album It’s OK To Listen To The Gray Voice from 1984]. I had another guitar player who never recorded called Ross Traut, a very good musician but he was never happy on the road, he was more like a studio musician, so he left, and there was no band for a minute. Then I thought, I am getting interested in keyboard sounds, sampling and synthesizers, so I was looking for a keyboard player and we travelled here with a Swedish player called Lars Jansson. We never recorded, and then at some point Eberhard [Weber] suggested Rainer [Brüninghaus] that could maybe come along and he has been there ever since.”
The nucleus of Brüninghaus, who joined in 1988, plus Weber and Garbarek would form the basis of the Jan Garbarek Group, who with Nana Vasconcelos on percussion – later replaced by the long-serving Marilyn Mazur until 2007 – provided Garbarek with his regular touring band that annually criss-crosses Europe and the world to this day; although they have made surprisingly few albums, the two-CD set Dresden, recorded in 2007 but released in 2009, is the band’s latest. Because of his long association with his group it is tempting to think the Jan Garbarek Group has come to define Garbarek’s music. But as the saxophonist points out, “Although I come up with most of the material, or choose material from other composers I want to include, in that sense I am in charge, but the way the music is actually shaped – that’s very much a collaborative effort.”
In fact, Garbarek’s musical aesthetic is defined as much with his group, as in his ‘solo’ projects and ad hoc collaborations with other musicians. So it is more helpful to look at the totality of Garbarek’s work to get a handle on the ‘real’ Garbarek, as the saxophonist explains: “There were three different things going on – my live playing with the group, my collaborations with other musicians and then my ‘special’ projects, like All Those Born With Wings. The first project of that kind was earlier with Ralph Towner, a duo album called Dis [1977]. So there were sidelines you might say but a very important guide to what I was going to be doing later on, just me and my ideas and then adding a few people and trying to make that happen, whereas with the Group we were all very equal input, which was great also, but I wasn’t in control. I couldn’t really steer the music the way I wanted to, I was just happy getting as much as possible from the other guys and bringing as much as possible myself into their scheme.
“But this line of Dis, Eventyr, All Those Born With Wings – they were really ideas I had which I got to try out in the studio and would influence later groups, you might say. Also at the same time there were my collaborations: ’81, ’82, with Egberto Gismonti and Charlie Haden [Magico and Folk Songs], which were also very important; then later came a collaboration with L. Shankar the Indian violin player, which was a tremendous influence also on me, it was wonderful. Then I was supposed to do a duo album with Paul Motian and one week before, he called and said he had a gig in New York and he’d like to cancel the recording, for which I was very upset. Not much time to figure out what to do, but I had been on tour with Keith, an ECM tour, and on that tour Egberto Gismonti and Nana Vasconcelos also played, so I called Nana and asked if he would be ready to do something at short notice, and he came in, and I thought of that guitar player John Abercrombie so we did a trio – very free music, I brought in folk themes and whatever – and that’s a very important step for me, that album.
Haden, Garbarek & Gismonti performing the title track from the album Magico
“It was a blessing in disguise – Eventyr [1981]. It was free and it was folky at the same time which I loved and it was a kind of a production also – we overdubbed some things, it was quite a different way of making albums for me. So that was very interesting, also working with percussion in that way. It was a kind of dream I always had, but working with a master like Nana, you know, and seeing what he brought to the session, it was amazing for me, it was a very important stepping stone in where I went after.
“So I have my band, which went along nicely with strong input by everybody involved; then there was my solo projects, as it were, also with other people, but really totally my ideas; and then there was these collaborations, with different musicians, different live groups, recordings and so on. So there were three main lines; they all sort of interacted, of course, from my point of view, because one day I would be doing one of them and the next the other, so it was all mixed up, but I can see now that there were very distinct threads going parallel.”
But as Garbarek admits, these three parallel threads over time have become closer and sometimes intertwine, “The way I see it these lines are still going, but they are closer now than they were in the 1970s and 1980s”. Yet as Garbarek admits, in his music, things have never stood still. Even his long-serving Group, which had played so often together they seemed to communicate musically through telepathy, had change forced on them in 2007. While Rainer Brüninghaus on keyboards, a Garbarek Group member since 1988, remained ever present, their regular percussionist Marilyn Mazur was unable to tour since she had a series of concerts and commissions in her homeland of Denmark.
In her stead came two musicians, percussionists Manu Katché and Trilok Gurtu who split the 2007 tour dates between them. However, Eberhard Weber, the group’s long-time bass player, tragically suffered a stroke mid-tour and had to be replaced at short notice by the Brazilian bassist Yuri Daniel, currently resident in Portugal. Sadly it seems that Weber, the master bassist will never play again. “Eberhard was such a very influential part of the band we had,” says Garbarek sadly. “He can’t play, and I suppose he will never play again so that was a big blow. So these random things that influence the way the music goes, one has to embrace that and make the most of it. There is always something that will influence the music, some input from another member.”
But what of the future? During his long musical odyssey, Garbarek’s music has been a work in progress, “It never really stands still,” he says. “Not at any point in time can you say, ‘Now I reached something’ because then it moves on and it could be all sorts of incidents leading to that.” Candidly he admitted in this interview that he is still thinking of change, this time orchestrally and electronically: “I would be very interested in some real keyboard player, synth/sample player; Rainer is more focused on the grand piano obviously, and that is his main instrument, which is fine of course. He has a lot to offer there, but it might be interesting at some point for me to try and find someone that is truly interested in electronics, the electronic side of keyboard playing and see what would come out of that. But that is difficult, I have been looking and all the brilliant players who know everything I need them to know about music, about chords and whatever, they want to play the grand piano more than anything, so one cannot force them to play synths although that may be what I am looking for. Unfortunately Joe Zawinul is no longer with us, so the master is gone in that field. I never had a chance to work with him unfortunately. But there is an open space right there, I am looking for someone who is serious about sound, let’s call it electronic orchestration, someone with an arranger’s mind who could add that dimension to the music as well – that might be very interesting, so maybe one day it might work!”
‘Allting Finns’ Officium Novum (ECM 2125)
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Words: Stuart Nicholson
Photos: courtesy of ECM Records (mouse over photos for credits)
Jan Garbarek is currently touring the UK and Ireland with gigs at: Canterbury Cathedral (20th Oct 2011), St Thomas’ Church, Belfast (21st Oct); St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin (22nd Oct) and North Cathedral, Cork (23rd Oct). His latest album with The Hilliard Ensemble, Officium Novum, came out last year on ECM.
Fantastic article, truly “in depth”, offering insight even to those who know Garbarek well. Especially the beginnings and some of his personal viewpoints show sides of him that have not been revealed before.