Jan Garbarek: Unmatchable Poetic Authority in Jazz Today
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MARGINS OF MUSIC MARGINS OF MUSIC Jan Garbarek: unmatchable poetic authority in jazz today. For some to him at his home studio – as was the case with a listeners, however, the combination of Garbarek with recent contribution to a Mari Boine album – he was Armenian violist Kim Kashkashian and (ex-Sting) improvising. But – and it is a big but – improvising in weaver of (jazz) dreams drummer Manu Katché made for an album uncom- response to structures, with a particular sensitivity to fortably close to sophisticated ambient music, or even shaping appropriate factors of tone, texture and the worse, pop. dynamics of phrasing. For such critics the news that, straight after the end Of course, apart from his unique tone, with that Michael Tucker on the abiding popularity of Norway’s master of valley jazz of his Autumn 2004 tour, Garbarek headed off to magnificent glowing warmth infusing its now frosted, Moscow to play a concert with early music vocal now exultant edge, the factor that first really distin- specialists The Hilliard Ensemble (with whom he guished Jan Garbarek as a musician was his ability to recorded the million-plus 1993 best seller Officium and play song-like melody, rather than skate through a the later, double-disc Mnemosyne) would only confirm complex sequence of harmonic changes for the sake of the sad fact that the jazz musician Jan Garbarek – the it. From this point of view, one could say that a musi- man who cut those slaughtering albums with Keith cian like the (quintessentially American) saxophonist Jarrett all those years ago in the mid 1970s – has long Michael Brecker is the polar opposite to the (quintes- traded in his improvising credentials for a safer day’s sentially European, or Nordic) Jan Garbarek. And, great work at the office. technical musician that Brecker is (remaining, for As someone who has been listening to (and writing some, the most influential saxophonist of the past about) Jan Garbarek for over thirty years now, I have to decades), I know to whom I would rather listen, night express my disagreement with any such point of view, after night. on several counts. The critic Whitney Balliett may well Almost forty years separate Jan Garbarek’s first ven- have captured a good deal of the spirit of jazz in his ture into recording from the current In Praise of famous remark of the 1950s that this music was, above Dreams.A variety of reasons make it interesting to com- all else, ‘the sound of surprise’. However, this does not pare the nineteen-year-old’s tenor sax version of the mean, of course, that jazz has somehow to sound com- hard bop blues/jazz classic ‘Walkin’, recorded as a duo pletely different, every time it is played. A good deal of performance with Swedish bassist Kurt Lindgren at the the music of Duke Ellington was completely written 1966 Warsaw Jazz Festival, with the concluding track on out for his orchestra, and some of the most influential Dreams, the (multi-tracked) solo piece ‘A tale begun’. ‘A lot of the time, jazz has meant: no barriers.’ – Sonny Rollins piano trios in jazz – such as those of Oscar Peterson in Garbarek and Lindgren explore the theme and vari- the late 1950s or Bill Evans in the early 1960s – based ation format of ‘Walkin’ for some eight or so minutes, n late November 2004 the Jan Garbarek Group promoter, the Jan Garbarek Group is probably the only their improvisations on arrangements which had been the placing of the hard-grained and somewhat dry, played in Brussels, winding up their lengthy, thirty- European jazz group working today which offers such a thoroughly honed in rehearsal. As Ray Brown, bassist overtly measured saxophone phrases across the strong, Inine-dates tour of Europe with the last of many bankable guarantee. Naturally, this has led certain with Peterson for so many years, once remarked, ‘Some if slightly stiff pizzicato bass pulse generating appropri- sold-out concerts. Part of the tour included a range of members of the jazz police to ask whether or not what people think we jazz musicians just fall ate tension. The traditional earth-rooted feeling of the concerts in Britain, with a headline closing appearance the Jan Garbarek Group plays today can be called jazz out of bed and play the D-flat scale.’ blues is altered at times at the London Jazz Festival, broadcast soon afterwards any more. Should jazz music really be so popular? And When Jan Garbarek is asked why he on Fiona Talkington’s Late Night Junction slot on should it be presented, as it is with this group, with a doesn’t improvise anything like as BBC3. I caught the group at Brighton’s Dome Theatre. special stage rig and lighting show? Do all such factors much today as he used to in the past The two-hour-plus, wide-ranging set had changed sig- not mean that the essential spontaneity of jazz has been (with George Russell, Keith Jarrett, nificantly since the last couple of times I had heard the abandoned for the polished slickness of the ‘sold-out’ – Bobo Stenson or Bill Frisell, for exam- quartet at the Bergen Jazz Festival in May 2002 and at indeed, ‘show-biz’ – spectacle? ple) his reply is usually something on Salisbury Cathedral a year later. Towards the end of the Similar questions have been raised by some critics the lines of the following: ‘Well, you performance, some tough and lengthy passages of about Garbarek’s latest solo album In Praise of Dreams, know I feel that I’m still improvising blues-inflected tenor testifying from Garbarek offered the first release under his own name since the 1998 today, but in a different way. For me, welcome complementary contrast to some typical double CD Rites.Co-produced with long-time friend it’s just as much of a challenge to moments of rubato soprano tenderness, before the and producer Manfred Eicher and released on the lat- bring a note to full life within a beautifully modulated drama of the Hasta Siempre ter’s Munich-based ECM label, the new disc has sold in melodic phrase, night after night, as encore (an old favourite from the 1970s) left a good gold-plated bucketfuls and been nominated for a it once was to play all those lines with many in the audience baying for yet more. Grammy. Within its overall unity of mood, for me the George or Keith.’ When I asked him Over the past fifteen years the group – which record contains many truly arresting features, such as about this after his Brighton con- besides saxophonist and flautist Garbarek features the modulation from the initial soprano-led ‘As seen cert, he made much the same point, photos and covers ECM and photos German keyboardist Rainer Brüninghaus, his compa- from above’ to the later, searing passages of declama- underlining that whether he played triot the electric bassist Eberhard Weber, and the tion in this opening piece, the electronic textures and with the Hilliard Ensemble, and Danish drummer and percussionist Marilyn Mazur – folkish echoing of lines on the title track and the gran- improvised his lines to their note- has established the sort of reputation that enables it ite-like authority of the austere tenor meditations of reading, or put a tenor track on to fill substantial concert halls, year after year. For a ‘One goes there alone’, a classic example of Garbarek’s some partially finished piece sent 60 www.fourthdoor.co.uk www.fourthdoor.co.uk 61 Whatever, it is an especially potent example of the new was to both the Nazi and Soviet authorities – to be kind of poetics in music that Garbarek has created over reminded of how overt and crucial a theme this can be, the years. And as the title of his latest album indicates, rooted in the socio-political and racial realities of Afro- this is essentially a space of (and for) dreams. American life. On the other hand, one has only to think Over the years, Jan Garbarek has come to create of a musician like John Coltrane and a track like the music of both an expansive, contemporary vocabulary 1963 Alabama – Coltrane’s deeply affecting rubato and ancient, archetypal vision. It is music which is meditation on the death of four black children in a open, essentially, to the poetics of both psychic space racist bombing of a church in that town – to be and the elements: to North and South, East and West; reminded how the piquancy of jazz can serve to open by some judicious moments of abstracted thematic dis- earth and fire, wind and water. Finely crafted, lucid up in one the sort of trans-cultural feelings which the placement from the young Garbarek, somewhat remi- music that as it is – qualities in plentiful evidence Spanish poet, dramatist and artist Federico Garcia niscent of Eric Dolphy’s way with a blues line. In throughout In Praise of Dreams – it remains music Lorca summarised through his central idea of cante retrospect, the brief, freely cast coda – with its power- which has always had the courage to engage the some- jondo,or ‘deep song’. ful, drone-like figures on arco bass – is especially inter- times disturbing, sometimes fructifying energy of the Coltrane once observed that, every esting. Chance as it may have been, the fact that unconscious, the better to intimate transcendent (or, now and then, it was important to look Garbarek’s first recording should feature bass so rather, transmuted) realms. One thinks of the Hamsun- back at the roots of things, and try to strongly is intriguing, given the many later recorded like ‘wandering’ interplay of saxophone, guitar and see them in a new light.