Jan Garbarek Group
Biography Jan Garbarek Group
This one is very eagerly-awaited: it has been six years since Jan Garbarek’s last album as a leader (“In Praise of Dreams”). And, moreover, this double-album – recorded in Dresden’s Alter Schlachthof in October 2007 – is also the first-ever live set from the highly-popular Garbarek Group. The band, now including Brazilian bassist Yuri Daniel, powers through repertoire old and new, and the Norwegian saxophonist is in top form, his exchanges with Manu Katche’s bold, emphatic drums particularly exciting. Material includes “Twelve Moons”, “There Were Swallows”, “Voy Cantando”, an ecstatic version of “Paper Nut” (last heard on Shankar’s “Song for Everyone”) and much more. Released in time for Jan’s extensive autumn tour.
The new group tackles its repertoire head-on; with the interaction between Jan Garbarek and drummer Manu Katché at the centre of the music. Yuri Daniel, a Brazilian bassist living in Portugal whose previous associations have ranged from Maria João’s group to the Lisbon Underground Music Ensemble, helps to anchor the pulses and rhythm patterns. Rainer Brüninghaus, a Garbarek Group member since 1988, maintains his long-established role as colourist-in-action. While both bassist and keyboardist claim their own solo space, more often they help to shape a climate in which Garbarek’s hymnic, declamatory and intensely melodic solos can find full expression, drawing energy also from Katché’s hard-driving drums. As The Guardian wrote of the group on this leg of the 2007 tour, “The contrast between an intense jamming sound and the songlike simplicity of the tunes is always Garbarek’s magic mix, but this version of the band has an exhilarating intensity.”
Line-Up:
Jan Garbarek (soprano and tenor saxophones, silje flute)
Rainer Brüninghaus (piano, keyboards)
Yuri Daniel (bass)
Manu Katché (drums)
In 1970, Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek made his first recording for Manfred Eicher’s then-fledgling ECM. Over the next 25 years, Garbarek averaged almost one album a year for the label as a leader, and also functioned as something of a house saxophonist for the label, playing on numerous sessions in support of other musicians on the roster. Garbarek’s distinctive style and tone on both tenor and soprano sax – austere, ethereal, plaintive but tightly controlled – became an integral part of the so-called ‘ECM sound’.
After 1995, Garbarek’s prolific output tapered off, but this most recent two-disc live set (amazingly, Garbarek’s first-ever live recording as a leader) celebrates 40 years of his stellar music-making with a very generous representation of his aesthetic vision.
Early on, Garbarek was schooled by jazz theorist George Russell and aligned himself with the experimental fringes of the European jazz community. However, over the course of his career, he gradually moved toward a more introspective idiom that combined elements of folk, world and chamber music. Most famously (or infamously), he collaborated in 1993 with an Early Music vocal group, the Hilliard Ensemble, at a time when Gregorian chant was all the rage. The recording was an unexpected commercial success for ECM (and certainly a beautiful thing of its kind), but it was the ultimate confirmation for serious jazzers that Garbarek was no longer a jazz player at all, but instead a purveyor of upscale, new age parlour music.
The best thing about this new concert recording is that it places Garbarek solidly within a traditional jazz quartet, made up of French drummer Manu Katché, Brazilian bassist Yuri Daniel and long-time Garbarek pianist Rainer Brüninghaus – he’s been aboard since 1988. The program is diverse, drawing upon Garbarek’s extensive recorded repertoire and touching various ethnic bases. But in the context of a live concert, the saxophonist’s restrained ambient tendencies are balanced by vigorous interplay among band members and by much of his own solo work, which not only demonstrates Garbarek’s melodic gifts and typical mastery of tone and technique, but provides some real bite – sometimes bringing to mind his impassioned wailing as a member of Keith Jarrett’s celebrated European quartet back in the late 1970s.
Consequently, Dresden: In Concert becomes an almost perfect showcase for the full range of Garbarek’s unique legacy and talent. (BBC, Bill Tilland)
