'I want to be freer, to cast the net wider'

Norwegian tenor and soprano saxaphonist Jan Gabarek is a jazz player who resists categorisation other than that he tries to 'fly' with his music, writes LAURENCE MACKIN

THERE ARE NO easy answers with Jan Garbarek. That’s not to say that he is a difficult man to talk to. Rather, he is polite and charming, even if at the age of 64 there are probably few questions about his life and work that he hasn’t answered dozens of times.

It’s more that Garbarek resists categorisation, having cut a singular career that respects no borders in its pursuit of musical purity. Garbarek was born in 1947 in Mysen in Norway, to a Polish father, who was a former prisoner of war, and a Norwegian mother. He has been with the same label, ECM, for almost his entire career, and approaches new ideas and releases with the simple wish to make something significant and musically meaningful. Indeed, his sound has become inseparable from ECM’s ethos and image.

His collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble, which tomorrow night comes to St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin and then travels to Cork on Sunday, is a case in point. "We did the first album [ Officium] in the mid-1990s; I would say we though the result was quite nice, quite satisfying. I thought it would find a few hundred listeners, which would be fine. At some point, we heard a rumour that there was a lot of interest and then it took off completely, and there was a tremendous amount of requests for touring."

The rumours were true. To date the album that Garbarek expected to shift a few hundred units has sold 1.5 million copies and two further records have extended his collaboration with the early music vocal quartet. This is not a bombastic production; the albums were recorded live and the concerts use no microphones, relying on the natural acoustics of their carefully chosen venues and the combined talents of the Hilliard Ensemble and Garbarek’s saxophone to make the music work. Is it terribly intimidating to be walking into a space that might not deliver?

“It’s not nerve-wracking, in that we can survive anyway. It’s just not pleasurable to the same extent. It can be such a wonderful experience. It’s just harder to get across, to fly.”

From early in his career, Garbarek has been trying to fly with his music, but it was the American composer, George Russell, who first brought him to wider attention. “I was playing the festival in Molde [in Norway] and we were playing in this cellar and I was on stage with my eyes closed and suddenly something happened, something that changed everything.”

Russell had taken a seat behind the piano and was whipping up a storm. “I went with it for as long as I dared and then I turned around and saw George sitting there, and he was an extremely dynamic and intense person, playing piano with his fists and elbows; the most important thing was to reach a kind of climax in an orgiastic way. This was quite common in the 1960s, to reach for the skies,” says Garbarek, laughing at the memory. “This is what he did but he used every means; at the time, we played sort of free but not to the same extent, and after that session that was a great moment for me, to have an established older musician recognise me . . . and for the first time in my life the idea came to mind that I could be a musician.”

This set Garbarek on his career path, one which would see him embrace and outgrow free jazz, and he often refers to jazz as an almost historic term. “For me jazz is Louis Armstrong, it’s Duke Ellington, it’s Oscar Peterson, it’s even Charlie Parker. And to some degree, Miles Davis in his earlier years. Later Coltrane and later Miles Davis is not jazz for me. It became something else.

“I don’t need to label it. If anything, I was a free jazz player, where anything was allowed, but what I found was not everything was allowed. It had a sameness and that indicated rules and everything had very strict rules, and I wanted to be freer and cast the net wider.”

Is this what he does with the Hilliard Ensemble? "Certainly, absolutely – I find that I am more free from the rigidity or any constraints. I remember the first time I had that thought, I was quite young, 18 or something, and I was playing with George Russell and we were playing In a Lonely Place. It had an intro for solo saxophone for five minutes, and he gave me just two notes, C and B. Having to deal with that for five minutes, up against a wall and the audience, with just two notes, was a real eye-opener. You have to come up with some drama, some musical progression, and I rather enjoyed that, me being put on the spot with those constraints."

A lot of conversations with Garbarek tend to wind their way back to Russell, if he hadn’t taken a seat that night, where would Garbarek have ended up? “Well I had my plans set, I would take high school and go and study language. I had a very good teacher interested in comparative linguistics, and this fascinated me, and I wanted to study that and possibly work in the university for the rest of my life.”

Languages and music, particularly jazz, are not so far apart, and many players will frequently describe music as a language. The aim is to get playing to a level of fluency that is on a par with speaking, so that notes come out as easy and essentially as words. “Indeed,” insists Garbarek. “All music is language and it’s all related. I have had a great opportunity, representing [music from] various geographic areas and from completely different locations and eras. There is so much in common.”

Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble play St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin on Saturday and North Cathedral, Cork, on Sunday. See mintakamusic.com