Jazz musician Jan Garbarek talks to Ray Comiskeyabout melancholy, diversity, joy, John Coltrane - and Dolly Parton
According to the late Ingmar Bergman, the bad news is that God is dead; the good news is that in every human being there is a room that is holy; the decor might be a tad gloomy, but that's the best we can hope for.
Some might see this as typically Scandinavian angst, part of the region's cultural DNA, and it's true that a strain of high seriousness, a touch of melancholy, even, is one of the characteristics of its art. But it's just one. And Jan Garbarek, acknowledged for decades as Norway's most important jazz musician, has had that kind of simplistic description applied to his own music in the past. A warm, genuinely nice man, he doesn't buy into the notion that they do only melancholy in that part of the world.
"We do have all kinds of music," is his reaction to such lazy cultural stereotyping. "To people who say my music is melancholy, I suggest that's because they have an understanding of what melancholy is. For me, of course, my music is all aspects, all emotions." One of the things that gives a particular edge to happiness and the experience of beauty is a sense of the fragility and impermanence of everything. And some of the greatest jazz musicians from the area, even at their most buoyant, have an almost physical awareness of that in their music. So a word like melancholy, in fact, suggests something far more complex than merely sadness.
"It triggers a whole range of sensations," he agrees. "When I was quite young, in 1963 or 64, Lars Gullin" - the great Swedish baritone saxophonist - "was a guest at a jazz festival in Molde on the west coast of Norway. I've been to this festival for about 20 years and, especially when I was young, I was there all the time and I heard a great deal of concerts. But I have two moments when time stood still for me. There was one concert with Lars Gullin and he played Darn That Dream - and it was ab-so-lute-ly magic," he says. "There was a certain stillness in the room at the experience of his playing. It was very sincere and moving. The song should only be played like that, I find. It was very, very magical.
"And the other one was the tenor saxophonist, Ben Webster, playing Stardust, on the same stage, in similar circumstances. It was one of those moments when an angel walked through the room, as we say. Those moments are frozen in time within your personality. You will carry it always with you. That's such a wonderful gift to have - to recognise and feel it, and then to carry it around with you. Let it linger through your life as one of the great moments."
THAT'S HARDLY A negative, melancholic take on life and art - to recognise the power of music to reach and express something deep within the human psyche. And even the most casual glance at Garbarek's career reveals an artist only too willing to celebrate diversity. He's played jazz, free and otherwise, ambient jazz composition, early music with the Hilliard Ensemble, performed with other classical musicians such as the violist, Kim Kashkashian, and with Indian classical musicians, and folk players from Asia, Africa and Brazil. In anyone else it would reek of restlessness, an absence of roots. But Garbarek, who once described his origins as "the north and nature, song and mystery", is nothing if not rooted in Norway. His sound, especially on soprano saxophone, has a hair-raisingly unique cry to it, and there is something strikingly direct and folklike, beyond mere sophistication, in his playing. And jazz and folk music are central to him as an artist.
"I guess it was always there," he says, "because I'm not really a trained musician, either classically or otherwise. I mean, it all started out listening to Coltrane. Technically, Coltrane's music is sort of massive, which I didn't know at the time. It was really my first encounter with music other than for dance purposes. I've given this some thought later on. It's a kind of mystery to me, but there was something coming out of his music which was way beyond technicality and theory and cleverness and all that stuff. There was something very immediate.
"And this is what I find also in some folk music. Folk music can also be done cleverly, or intricately, or technically magnificent, but usually when I'm deeply attracted to something it's because there's something else emanating from the music. And this is what you can find still in some folk music." You either feel it or you don't? "I guess it's as simple as that for me. It was always like that, which also makes me not have any particular favourite genres, or styles, or periods in music. I can find things I enjoy hearing in the most strange places, where I'm not supposed to look, even. I might find great joy," he laughs, as the thought strikes him, "in listening to a particular piece with Dolly Parton, for that matter. One is supposed to look down on that music, but I never did. If I hear something, I don't care who it is or where it comes from." Garbarek has explored so many things in music that a listener could be paralysed by choice; it's easier to pick when the options are fewer. So how does he, as a musician, feel about limits, and how does setting them impact on his creativity? "That's actually like a catalyst, in a way, for creativity, and I've faced both ends of that spectrum. The first time I realised it was when I was playing with the American composer, George Russell. I got two notes, a B-flat and an A, and he said I should play only those two notes for five minutes. And I did! And it was quite liberating. You didn't have to think about which notes to play because it was a given, but you had to find ways to deal with those notes."
What about no limitations? Playing free? "My personal insight into that," he answers thoughtfully, "was in the 1960s. We really played what we thought was free. We would go on stage and play without anything prepared. Everybody was improvising everything. But, you see, what struck me after a couple of years was - how come the free improvisations sort of had a lot in common with each other? They were very similar." That, he admits, was disconcerting. He recalls a story his longtime bassist, Eberhard Weber, told him about a free jazz encounter in a Baden-Baden studio. A pianist opened a "free" improvisation with a C Major scale and was firmly told by the producer that "das ist nicht frei - that is not free".
"So that makes me wonder. Let's say I want to play Tea For Two cha-cha-cha. That would be 'free' if I could do that, but of course if I could do that it wasn't 'free' jazz any longer."
The smile in his voice is obvious. "So my own development was more in the direction of freedom in the sense that I could do the types of material I wanted to do. But in the 1960s it meant no preparation, no arrangement. Just try to find the most interesting noises with your instrument." Doesn't the mind rebel against the idea of doing just anything? "Yes, but this 'anything' is very much an illusion, because anything we do is based on what we have heard and what we know and how we put it back together again in our own crazy minds. This total freedom is non-existent. The other opposite would be, you know, that somebody asks you to do whatever you like with whatever format you want. It could be a symphony orchestra, or solo saxophone, or anything in between. And however long you want; one minute or an hour, and there you are. And you cannot decide anything at all, because all the options are there and it strangles your creativity. So something in between, some restrictions, are very good, I find."
One of the many times he has achieved that balance between form and freedom is in the quartet format he will bring to Dublin. Instrumentally, it's the same as the group with whom he made such magnificent music in Cork at the 2003 Guinness Jazz Festival, though only himself and the keyboardist, Rainer Brüninghaus, are holdovers from then. Eberhard Weber is recovering from illness - his place is being taken by the Brazilian, Yuri Daniel - while the percussionist, Marilyn Mazur, is replaced by Manu Katché.
Asked about repertoire, he says he likes to "keep a thread from the old days going". But there will also be more recent material, and more new pieces as yet unrecorded. So, given his penchant for change and diversity, it will be quite different from before? "Yes, although, you know," he laughs again, "I'm me and the music I do is what I do. It's like if you have a swing or a bebop player and they play Autumn Leaves one night and All The Things You Are another night. They're different pieces, but the principle is the same. It's an illusion, in a way, to change the repertoire like that. We are who we are and we fit that into whatever material we have."
The Jan Garbarek Group will perform at The Helix tomorrow. www.thehelix.ie