Jan Garbarek says the kind of music he plays can no longer be called jazz, but it won't bother his huge following whatever anyone likes to call it, writes Stuart Nicholson
If dreams are movies of the mind, then In Praise of Dreams, the first album for six years by the saxophonist Jan Garbarek, is an ideal soundtrack. Invoking the kind of moods you get gazing out of the window on a wet Sunday afternoon, the colours and textures he generates by mixing acoustic and electronic instruments create a series of evocative yet atmospheric tone poems that can be returned to again and again without surrendering their mystery.
Garbarek is one of those rare musicians whose music effortlessly crosses the arbitrary boundaries created by music marketing. At one of his concerts you are just as likely to bump into a classical fan or a rock fan as you are a jazz fan. The reason is that while his haunting saxophone sound may be something of an acquired taste, audiences have discovered it's a taste well worth acquiring.
On In Praise Of Dreams you can hear exactly why his music is so difficult to pin down. For a start it's quite unlike anything he has done in the past. Here the improviser's art is played out against a new sonic backdrop, fragments of electronic sounds, rhythms and sampling swimming through the music.
Amid this world of altered realities and fresh possibilities, Garbarek's famously ethereal saxophone meets the haunting tones of Kim Kashkashian's viola while Manu Katché's shimmering percussion provides a vital flavour in this heady brew.
Electronics have appeared only occasionally on Garbarek's past albums, but here their use is central to the music's construction. "I took on a commission for a short film in Norway, which I did while on tour," he explains over a double espresso in the lounge of his London hotel. Tall, slim and casually dressed, he looks far younger than his 56 years. "I had my computer and all the software I needed. That got me going, so when I came home I just thought I will use this momentum to create some more compositions. I ended up doing more in the computer with all the sampling and synths, all those things available to me there. And then I realised I was well on my way to an album, and I thought this time I will create a mood. Even though there are tempo differences and so on, it still didn't break out of a certain atmosphere, a certain temperature. And that was really the most fundamental decision I made for the album."
The most striking feature of In Praise Of Dreams is the dialogue between Garbarek's saxophone and the viola of the classically trained Kashkashian, which atmospherically weave melody and counter melody between them. "I was really overwhelmed by the life and depth that Kim brought to the lines I presented to her," says Garbarek. "The way she plays the viola, the sensibility of the phrasing, all the subtleties and nuances of her sound production, it's very close to the way I'd like to play the saxophone. The richness in her sound brings the music to another level and gives me something to reach for in my improvisations. It was inspiring to work with her.
"I also wanted to have Manu Katché because I wanted a drummer who could find his way in between all the other pre-composed drum patterns I had used. I didn't want to lose those, and Manu is very used to that sort of work - he plays a lot more in the pop and rock groove, with groups like Sting and Peter Gabriel and these kind of people - so that the idea was nothing new to him. I was very comforted by that."
Here, then, is music that is informed by jazz, classical and even pop but is limited by none of them. Above all it's about Garbarek's saxophone tone, which somehow projects the stark imagery of nature near the Northern Lights, an ordered calm that's a major alternative to the often frantic world of jazz. Rigorous and highly disciplined, he can transport the subconscious to mystical areas of thought. The result is among Garbarek's best albums.
Throughout his long career Garbarek has never been afraid of trying new ideas, never settling for the tried and tested. He has constantly reinvented the musical context that frames his famous tone. "That's the only thing I can change," he says. "Miles \, he was the master of reinventing the context. He seems to me to be playing quite similarly, to my ears, throughout most of his career as a trumpet player but always found a different backdrop."
If change is a leitmotif in Garbarek's considerable recorded output, then no musical collaboration was more startling than that with the Hilliard Ensemble, the UK's leading early-music group, in 1994. The resulting album, Officium, combining choral song of the 12th to 16th centuries with contemporary improvised saxophone, became a runaway international best-seller.
Albums such as Officium, with Garbarek flying high above the narrow, tradition-based definition of jazz that has emerged in the US, have caused the purists to scratch their heads and ask if they are jazz. Yet to Garbarek definitions only limit creative music making. "The whole idea of jazz - what it is and what it isn't and so on - is interesting," he says with a sudden smile. "I usually ask people who talk about jazz to define what they mean, because these days anything from Diana Krall and Norah Jones (onwards) is jazz. It's defined as jazz. I don't really consider it jazz. For me jazz is definitely Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington and whatever was done until the late 1960s. Then it gradually became something else, I think.
"So it's all about definition, I suppose. But lately it's become even more narrowed down. Jazz has become 1958 to 1964, a re-creation of what was done then: that's jazz, the only way to go. And I think that's not really right, to monopolise that style of playing as the ultimate jazz - it's not.
"The question is, now, do we need to call it jazz? Or should it have another name? Or many names? I always like to think what I do would not be possible if I had not been a jazz musician and tried to learn the jazz language and syntax and vocabulary and whatever, because there is so much improvisation and rhythmic approach that stems from jazz in what I do.
"But there is also so many other things which I consider not to be jazz (in my playing). Then again jazz was a hybrid at the very outset, and it grew from there. And when it comes to boundaries it can be whatever and be jazz: there are all sorts of definitions now. But I have decided to use a very limited definition of jazz, and what I do is not jazz any more: it has to have another name."
Whatever you choose to call In Praise Of Dreams, there's no getting away from the fact that it's a very contemporary album of haunting and sometimes affecting beauty.
In Praise Of Dreams by Jan Garbarek is on ECM