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Jan Garbarek: Dansere

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: ECM Records
Released: 1975.11.03
Time:
 35:11
Category: Jazz
Producer(s): Manfred Eicher
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.garbarek.com
Appears with: Keith Jarrett, Eberhard Weber, The Hilliard Ensemble
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Dansere (J.Garbarek) - 15:08
[2] Svevende (J.Garbarek) - 5:03
[3] Bris (J.Garbarek) - 6:18
[4] Skrik & Hyl (J.Garbarek) - 1:35
[5] Lokk (J.Garbarek) - 5:44
[6] Til Vennene (J.Garbarek) - 4:47

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Jan Garbarek – Saxophones, Arrangement

Bobo Stenson – Piano
Palle Danielsson – Bass
Jon Christensen – Drums

Manfred Eicher - Producer
Jan Erik Kongshaug - Engineer
Frieder Grindler - Cover Design
Jochen Mönch - Photography

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


1975 LP ECM - ECM 1075
1990 CD ECM - ECM 1075

Recorded in November 1975 at Talent Studios, Oslo.

Dansere (Norwegian for "dancers") is an album by Jan Garbarek. The album was recorded at Talent Studios in Oslo in November 1975, and features the Bobo Stenson Quartet.



There is a tendency in ECM’s formative jazz releases toward immediately immersive beginnings. Dansere is thankfully no exception, with its introductory flutter of sax and glittering piano runs. Comparing this album to the recently reviewed Belonging, which features Keith Jarrett in the same company as Bobo Stenson is here, it’s amazing to consider the differences with another pianist at the fulcrum. One musician’s worth of difference may not seem like much on the back of an album jacket, but here it translates into essentially ten new voices with their own sensibility of time and space. Stenson’s abstractions throughout bleed into the listener’s mind like a broad smearing of watercolor across absorbent paper.

This is music that has woken up after a long slumber—so long, in fact, that now it struggles to face the morning glare. The musicians seem to play with their eyes closed, grasping at those fading tendrils of memory that are so close in dream-time yet otherwise so distant. Whereas some of us might grab a note pad and try to capture as many of those fleeting moments before they escape us upon waking, each member of this humble quartet finds an instrument and sets his recollections to music. The album finds the time to stretch its vocal cords, to take in the air, to look outside and judge the weather from the clouds and from the moisture it inhales.

The title track is the most demanding journey here, carrying us through a gallery of moods and locales, and fades out beautifully with Christensen’s rim shot clicking like a metronome into the heavy silence. In “Svevende” Stenson emotes a laid-back aesthetic, finding joy in quieter moments. Though we are by now fully awake, we still find ourselves regressing to the darkness of sleep and the promise of vision that it brings. Every moment leaves its own echo, so that each new note carries with it a remnant of all those it has left behind. “Bris” picks up the pace a little and showcases Garbarek in a heptatonic mode. Stenson also has some memorable solo work here, working wonderfully against Christensen’s drums and Danielsson’s steady thump. Somehow the music remains melancholy, speaking as it does in languages it has yet to understand. “Skrik & Hyl” features a sax/bass duet of piercing incantations before Stenson brings us back down to terra firma in “Lokk.” The title here means “herding song” and indeed feels like a call home. It unfolds like the dotted plain on the album’s cover, a desert in moonlight or an ocean swept by a lighthouse. “Til Vennene” is the end of a long and fruitful day. Yet in spite of the album’s pastoral flair, I find this final track to be rather urban. It shifts and settles like a drained glass of scotch, leaving only that diluted rim of sepia at the bottom: a mixture of melted ice and solitude. You feel just a little tipsy, straggling home through the rainy streets. Memory and sorrow swirl without blending, like every rainbow-filmed puddle you pass in gutters and potholes. You wander as if you are walking these streets for the first time, knowing that your legs will get you home regardless of your mental state. Your only footholds are those brief moments of bliss shared among friends; the only times when trust was never absent. Your world becomes blurry…or is it you who blurs?

ECM Records



Among the many stylistic twists and turns negotiated by Jan Garbarek early in his career, the subtle shift in direction from the previous, spectacular Witchi-Tai-To to Dansere was probably the most decisive. In fact, Dansere, recorded in 1975, was one of the first examples of what would come to be known as the "ECM sound," not so much for the usual crystalline recording quality but for a creeping, languidly pastoral sensibility that would become more and more prominent both in Garbarek's own work as well as in the label's releases in general. Still, that granola and Birkenstock aura is subdued enough in this album to grudgingly recommend it to fans of his earlier work. Bassist Palle Danielsson, while less angular and experimental than Arild Andersen, provides a solid and propulsive foundation for Garbarek and Stenson, the former tending to increasingly rein in his playing as the influence of Albert Ayler, so prominent in his first albums, continued to wane. Instead, one can hear traces of Keith Jarrett, with whom Garbarek had recently been working and, indeed, much of Dansere compares favorably with Jarrett's quartet work from around the same time. Fans of his subsequent work with the Hilliard Ensemble might find this relatively tough sledding while lovers of albums like Tryptikon could well hear excessive smoothness, but it stands up decently enough on its own merits.

Brian Olewnick - All Music Guide



The advent of Jan Garbarek in the late ’60s created a riptide. Here was a tenor saxophonist from Norway, of all places, who, like nearly everyone else at the time, emerged from the shadow of John Coltrane. But Garbarek flaunted such a raw, individual sound that his influence was immediate. By the time Sart was released in 1971, Garbarek had staked out his northern territory, one of rich folklore, sprawling soundscapes and a bright, penetrating tone that seemed to generate reverb regardless of acoustics.

Don Cherry and George Russell were quick to recognize the sea change Garbarek represented for the expanding multicultural possibilities of jazz, and the intrepid label ECM would carry that torch. This box-set reissue brings together three albums from between 1971 and 1975, a period of prolific activity for Garbarek and his Nordic compatriots that charts the development of his inimitable sound.

The modal title track of Sart begins with a keening guitar riff by fellow Norwegian jazz icon Terje Rypdal, evocative of Bitches Brew, a relatively new release at the time, but evading that Miles Davis totem with drummer Jon Christensen’s subtle cymbal work and Garbarek’s insistent cries. It’s a proclamation: Norway has arrived, and though Garbarek clearly acknowledges what’s going on in the jazz capital of the world, the fledgling Oslo jazz scene is no ersatz New York.

Garbarek’s world is an existential one, navigated with “Sart,” meaning “tenderness”; he is as acutely conscious of negative space as he is of the sustained pedals he employs to mete out an attenuated sense of time. The ethereal “Song of Space” conjures the harshness of Krzysztof Penderecki, with Rypdal and Garbarek’s contrapuntal wailing forging a beautiful dissonance. On bassist Arild Andersen’s “Close Enough for Jazz,” Garbarek contributes otherworldly bass saxophone work, reinforcing the cross-cultural point brought home by “Irr,” a bass-heavy Garbarek composition that prefigures the avant-garde trio Air.

Witchi-Tai-To, recorded with pianist Bobo Stenson as co-leader, takes its title from a Native American peyote chant composed by saxophonist Jim Pepper, an acolyte of Don Cherry. Garbarek takes a strong cue from the free-jazz cornetist here, incorporating the diverse influences of Carlos Puebla’s bolero “Hasta Siempre,” Carla Bley’s propulsive “A.I.R.,” which establishes Garbarek’s resonant voice on soprano, and Cherry’s spiritual “Desireless.” That 20-minute ritualistic piece builds in emotional intensity as the tempo accelerates, leveling off for a pastoral denouement, a hallmark of Garbarek’s playing.

Dansere is a self-proclaimed high-water mark for Garbarek, his spatial exploration reaching a new level of tactility and lyricism not as evident in his earlier work. Returning with the same quartet from Witchi-Tai-To, by 1975, Garbarek had a crystallized vision which was hard to surpass. The modal ambience of the title track, developed from Balinese scales, is complemented by the inner mounting tension of “Bris” and “Lokk,” based on a Norwegian cattle call that Garbarek treats with a masterful poetic touch.

Aidan Levy - 11/03/12
© 1999–2014 JazzTimes, Inc.



Drei der bemerkenswertesten Aufnahmen Garbareks aus den frühen 1970er Jahren sind nun, in einem Boxset versammelt, wieder erhältlich. Auf unterschiedliche Art warfen Sart (1971), Witchi-Tai-To (1973) und Dansere (1975) erfrischend intelligente und stimulierende Perspektiven auf: zu Fragen der Dynamik, des Gruppenklangs, Zusammenspiels und Swing, dem Verhältnis von Improvisation und Abstraktion zu den Wurzeln des Jazz, und nach der Relevanz von archetypischen, aber mit moderner Auffassung gebrauchten Folk-Elementen für die zeitgenössische Musik. Zwei der aufregendsten Ensembles jener Ära sind hier zu hören - Garbarek / Stenson / Rypdal / Andersen / Christensen auf dem experimentellen Sart, und das beherzte Jan Garbarek-Bobo Stenson Quartet auf Witchi-Tai-To und Dansere.

JPC.de
 

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