Nothing is more difficult than what is simple. For 60 years, Jan Garbarek has been striving to make the difficult clear and obvious.
As an improvising musician, Jan Garbarek says he seeks to adapt his playing "to the tone, texture and temperament of the music: it's about finding a common language". His quest for this language has spanned the ages, from the folk songs of his native Norway, through jazz and Indian music, to improvisations based on medieval polyphony.
Born in Mysen, Norway, Garbarek first heard John Coltrane on the radio, which inspired him to take up the saxophone. In 1962, Garbarek won a competition for jazz amateurs and patiently built his career, also spending four years with composer and jazz theorist George Russell, who later described him as "the most original musician in European jazz since Django Reinhardt". In 1969, Manfred Eicher, founder of ECM, asked Garbarek to join the roster of his new label. Garbarek's first ECM album was Afric Pepperbird. "After recording it, we knew we had something special," recalls Eicher. It was to be the first step in one of ECM's most successful recording careers.
Jan Garbarek gained international recognition in the mid-1970s playing with Keith Jarrett's European Quartet, which released the albums Belonging, My Song and the live recordings Personal Mountains, Nude Ants and Sleeper.
In 1979, Garbarek recorded Photo with Blue Sky, the first in a series of albums with the Jan Garbarek Group, a group that toured regularly and whose composition evolved over the decades. It wasn't until 2007 that they recorded a live album, the double CD Dresden.
Therefore, it was with Officium, one of the most important recordings of his career, that his saxophone - a "fifth voice" - weaves lines around the polyphony of the vocal quartet, creating effects as spellbinding as they are unexpected. In 1999, a suite, Mnemosyne, broadened the palette, and Officum Novum explored Armenian music.
Jan Garbarek has moved and moved audiences in many ways: Keith Jarrett, Anouar Brahem, The Hilliard Ensemble and many others. His "organ sound", so to speak, has long been the "Jan Garbarek Group", the Quartet with Yuri Daniel, Rainer Brüninghaus and Trilok Gurtu, the Indian master drummer.
"Atmosphere" doesn't always have to be a negative notion in music. The Jan Garbarek Group offers - what could be more beautiful than what we've come to expect from the arts, the times and the listener - a different overall state.
