"His music is an affirmation, and it
is full of resonances of……
half-forgotten things from long ago"
The Rough Guide to Jazz on Jan
Garbarek
Six years down the
line from the epochal Rites and
five since the second Hilliard collaboration
(Mnemosyne), the genius of Norwegian
saxophonist Jan Garbarek is again in
our midst. Accompanied this time only
by long time collaborator, drummer Manu
Katché and brilliant classical
violist Kim Kashkashian (fresh from
their work together on the music of
Tigran
Mansurian), Garbarek pares everything
down to the basics with stunning results.
Uncannily, when I first heard this,
I was reading the recent paperback reissue
of Alan Garner's masterpiece Thursbitch;
the latter's theme of sentient landscape
is so in keeping with what Garbarek's
music, on this disc and others. For
example, in the case of Legend of
the Seven Dreams I almost saw it
as a soundtrack to the narrative, the
fjords of Norway and my own north Cheshire
locale seemingly merging into one.
The title piece is
reminiscent of an old Celto-Nordic air,
of the sort that Aly Bain recorded on
his groundbreaking collaboration with
the BT Scottish Ensemble (Follow
the Moonstone), with Garbarek's
sax and Kashkashian's viola (fiddle?)
meshing together with a haunting beauty.
Its only concession to the 21st
century is represented by an underpinning
but muted, shuffling, sampled trip-hop
beat (see ECM stablemate Nils Petter
Molvær for more examples). Other
high points include the very short but
all-encompassing solo If you go far
enough, a piece as out of time as
the great but also brief Mirror Stone
from the aforementioned Legend
and also featured on the first ECM New
Series compilation - a predictor, I
wonder, of how the saxophonist would
bestride both imprints. Knot of place
and time is hypnotic in the extreme,
reminding me of the shamanic nature
of much of this music; see Michael Tucker's
excellent musical biography of Garbarek,
Deep Song, for further elucidation.
The whole sequence on the disc hangs
together very much as an unstated suite,
with the adoption of the viola proving
an inspired diversion. To borrow from
the estimable contemporary composer
Judith Weir, we are very much in the
realms of "distance and enchantment".
The individual track titles say nothing
and everything. The music is as if it
has always been there just waiting to
be "drawn down", a concept espoused
in the past by people as diverse as
Edmund Rubbra and the group New Order
(formerly Joy Division). Jan Garbarek
might be "filed" under a jazz label
but the reality is far more complex.
A mythic (as in archetypal rather than
fabricated) line seems to exist on which
his musical psyche can travel from the
Nordic/Celtic fringes of Eurasia through
the Balkans and Caucasus to the Indian
subcontinent and back again at will.
On this record, as on most of his releases
in the last ten to fifteen years, he
seems to have tapped in to our deep-seated,
subconscious ancestral memories. When
I first heard In Praise of Dreams
it felt like a kind of coming home,
the same feeling I got when reading
the aforementioned Thursbitch.
By turns stimulating,
challenging, reassuring, calming, cathartic,
Garbarek's music has never been as relevant,
as necessary as it is today. It is a
superb antidote to the vapid and threadbare
machinations of what regularly passes
for contemporary culture.
Neil Horner
Jan Garbarek, saxophones, keyboards, samplers,
percussion