JJ 01/86: Jan Garbarek Group – It’s OK To Listen To The Gray Voice

For my money this is Garbarek’s most intriguing recording to date, the perfect rebuttal of a recent, patronising description of ECM as ‘the Habitat catalogue of Jazz’. Intelligence and passion combine as fruitfully as individual and group to offer richly diversified music which respects jazz tra­dition in the best ways, by both making it new and setting it in much older psychological con­texts. There have long been powerful affinities between Garbarek’s music and the vision­ary tradition in Scandinavian cul­ture, which receive confirmation as the singular Norwegian aligns himself with the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer, an internationally regarded Swedish poet from whose recent work the album’s titles derive. Like Tranströmer, Garbarek cuts deep with a minimum of fuss. Here, his customary spare frameworks embrace minimalist patterns which attain para­doxically rich impact through highly imaginative group playing: Weber’s singing lines, Torn’s vari­egated fills and attack and DiPasqua’s sensitive restraint are particularly noteworthy.

The album begins in disturbing­ly withdrawn mood, the chilled guitar obligato, delicate arco bass and briefly fluttering soprano of White Noise intimating prep­aration for the shamanic trans­mutations of The Crossing Place and March. Their keening soprano and surreally splintered guitar ir­ruptions clear the air for the solid-bodied health of Mission, where expansive tenor projects the sen­sual and the spiritual in equal degree while Torn quarries the blues to raunchy effect.

The linked Island and Gray Voice meditations take us to the heart of Garbarek’s vision with haunting, lapidary eloquence. Weber’s lyrically sprung solo on Island is outstanding: like Garbarek’s floating soprano figures, it seems to gather deep space into itself. After the final dream-like ascension of the austere tenor-led Gray Voice, the folkish solo soprano of the brief Knife-Thrower’s Partner supplies a wry, bittersweet, but satisfying coda to this most completely realised of Garbarek’s recordings.

Discography
White Noise Of Forgetfulness; The Crossing Place; One Day In March I Go Down To The Sea And Listen (23.07) – Mission: To Be Where I Am; It’s OK To Phone The Island That Is A Mirage; It’s OK To Listen To The Gray Voice; I’m The Knife-Thrower’s Partner (19.36)
Jan Garbarek (ts/ss); David Torn (g/g syn/ DX7); Eberhard Weber (b); Michael DiPasqua (d). Oslo, December 1984.
(ECM 1294)