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Jan Garbarek: Triptykon

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: ECM Records
Released: 1972.11.08
Time:
 42:19
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] Rim (A.Andersen/J.Garbarek/E.Vesala) - 10:39
[2] Selje (Arild Andersen/Jan Garbarek/Edward Vesala) - 2:23
[3] J.E.V. (A.Andersen/J.Garbarek/E.Vesala) - 7:32
[4] Sang (A.Andersen/J.Garbarek/E.Vesala) - 2:51
[5] Triptykon (A.Andersen/J.Garbarek/E.Vesala) - 12:48
[6] Etu Hei! (J.Garbarek/E.Vesala) - 2:23)
[7] Bruremarsj (Old Norwegian folk song) - 4:13

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Jan Garbarek - Soprano, Tenor & Baritone Saxophones, Flute
Arild Andersen - Double Bass
Edward Vesala - Percussion

Manfred Eicher - Producer
Jan Erik Kongshaug - Engineer
Steve Lake - Liner Notes
Barbara Wojirsch - Design, Cover

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


1972 LP ECM Records - ECM 1029
1992 CD ECM Records - ECM 1029

Recorded at Arne Bendiksen Studio, Oslo on November 8, 1972.

Triptykon is the fourth album by Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, his third release on the ECM label, and is performed by Garbarek with Arild Andersen and Edward Vesala. The Allmusic review by Brian Olewnick awards the album 4½ stars and states "Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek took several intriguing stylistic turns early in his career, none more extreme than that shown on Triptykon... an expressionist trio drawing on both free improvisation and Scandinavian folk tunes, roaring, stumbling, and reeling, evoking an aural equivalent of Edvard Munch. Garbarek's work on all his reeds is assured and imaginative, even as the context is often dark and bleak... Highly recommended".



TRIPTYKON/THE POWER OF THREE

"Triptykon" is the sound of a musician in transition, Jan Garbarek working outward from his influences toward the discovery of his true voice, inspired and challenged by partners Andersen and Vesala. Of the groups Garbarek has directed through more than 20 years of ECM recordings, this one, with its enlightened, abundantly melodic free music, and its intermingling of three very independent voices, arguably came closest to being a real cooperative.

The band was formed from the wreckage of the old Esoteric Circle or "Afric Pepperbird" quartet. Norway's first important new jazz group – the Big Four as local critics still call them – had split in half when guitarist Terje Rypdal had launched his own unit, taking Jon Christensen with him.

Garbarek cast around for new players. Arild Andersen, who had resisted an offer to join the Rypdal band on electric bass, brought in Vesala. Arild and the drummer had played together with reedman Juhani Aaltonen in Finland. On guitar, Norwegian player Odd-Arne Jacobsen was drafted. Odd-Arne, a player with a penchant for "exotic" textures is still soldiering around the Scandinavian scene (the curious might care to investigate his 1991 release "Autumn Rain In May" on his own OAJR label). He did not last long in the line-up, however, when it was discovered that the real magic and improvisational flexibility lay with the trio.

If "Triptykon" seems, to ears accustomed to the streamlined Garbarek productions of later years, to take "freedom" to the edge of rawness on the title track, in performance the trio was freer still. The themes featured here were written for a set at the Trondheim festival of 1972 (they were primarily Garbarek's themes, shared compositional credits reflecting bassist's and drummer's contribution to spontaneous arrangement). Generally, the group would dispense with a set list altogether. "Perhaps Jan would sound a deep tone at the bottom of the bass sax ... that was all we needed to get moving." Flickering free dissolved time illuminated the band's sense of pulse but, when in the mood, they might run down a rock riff: "Edward," Andersen remembers, "used to enjoy playing what we called an 'English' backbeat'." Performances frequently included what might be termed free jazz standards. There was a "free-floating" rendition of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman", for example, and, almost nightly, Albert Ayler's "Ghosts", effectively the trio's theme song.

Contemporary critics have trouble considering Garbarek as an Ayler-oriented player, despite Jan's frequent allusions in interview to his influence. Yet obviously it is part of any player's apprenticeship to work through the techniques and ideas of the masters, assimilating elements relevant to his own conception. In any case, "Triptykon" makes the connections plain enough. "Bruremarsj", the first Norwegian folk song on a Garbarek record, has a clear-cut affinity to such Ayler epics as "Truth Is Marching In" and was approached for exactly this reason. The more scholarly, conscientious investigations - by both Garbarek and Andersen - into Norwegian folklore were still to come. But Don Cherry's description of Ayler as a "total folk musician" helps us see at least one natural point of contact. In its day, certainly, the "Triptykon" group was Europe's closest equivalent to the Ayler/Peacock/Murray trio, its music revealing a comparable nakedness and troubling beauty. Albert's notion of his sound as a "love cry" is also pertinent when one considers the yearning, imploring edge of Jan's tone.

Ornette Coleman's influence is not to be gainsaid, however. The buoyancy of Garbarek's line on "J.E.V", the sheer dancing joy of its fountaining melody, is very close to Ornette's innocent lyricism. It was interesting to hear some of this spirit bubbling to the surface - after two decades - on the Garbarek/Miroslav Vitous/Peter Erskine collaboration "Star" (ECM 1444), recorded in 1991 (see particularly the track called "Jumper").

Edward Vesala's crucial contribution to the group of 1972 lay in his sensitivity to the free ballad, a form he felt was more challenging - and a far more effective channel for emotional expression - than the rip-snorting tear-ups of the unrepentant power-players: "To throw a lot of sound out there, to overplay for effect, that's relatively easy. But to play
free BALLADS and still maintain tension ... it's heavy work, man. Try it and you quickly find out who the real players are. Also, in the time with Jan, I was really working on developing the idea of having the drums play a melodic role, and trying to make every pitch of drum or cymbal or bell mean something."

Arild Andersen: "We talked a lot about this idea of energy moving. Playing free rhythmically but without use of quarter-notes. Edward had this way of making slow pieces move without rhythm, working on phrases as an energy line. Live, Jan's bass sax patterns would sometimes provide an anchor that Edward and I would move around".

The rubato ballad, of course, has since become one of the staples of Garbarek's music. And one could make a case, too, for the poetic compression of Garbarek's later work beginning here, the power latent in the unsaid. The controlled holding-in-check of the bass saxophone and arco bass on "Sang" for example is still deeply moving in its reticence.

In its short lifespan the group worked a great deal in the Far North, playing almost every conceivable kind of venue, influencing no end of Scandinavian players-in-bud. (Saxophonist Jone Takamäki - see Kraka-tau's "Volition", ECM 1466 - remembers a revelatory springtime gig in a Finnish "youth disco": "It changed my life - that's how overwhelming it was.") Sometimes the trio played with writer Jan Erik Void, improvising freely to his texts. In one particularly intense period, playing school concerts by day and jazz clubs by night, they clocked up 40 performances in 14 days, then flew to Frankfurt for a festival gig with Chick Corea sitting in. "One of the strangest concerts I've ever played," Arild recalls. "We were all expecting the Chick of the Circle records and "Miles At Fillmore", but he had already moved on to his Latin fusion phase. '500 Miles High', all that. Playing, I spent half the gig listening to Chick and the other half listening to Edward."

The group did not so much disband as fade away, as Garbarek's services were ever more in demand. The saxophonist hooked up with pianist Bobo Stenson in the popular touring band of whose repertoire the more strictly structured "Witchi-Tai-To" and "Dansere" (ECM 1041 and 1075) are faithful documents; the Garbarek-Stenson Quartet gradually mutated into the Belonging band with Keith Jarrett - see "Belonging" (ECM 1050), "My Song" (ECM 1115), "Nude Ants" (ECM 1171/72), and "Personal Mountains" (ECM 1382). After his induction into the international scene and the creative peaks scaled with Garbarek and Andersen, Edward Vesala felt less happy with the improvising abilities of most of his Finnish contemporaries. He took to playing solo concerts (refer to the 1973 Blue Master album "I'm Here") and worked in earnest on compositions, slowly hatching the large ensemble pieces of "Nan Madol" (ECM 1077).

Arild Andersen, unwilling to abandon the freedoms of the trio format, headed for New York, and joined another great saxophonist and drummer in the Sam Rivers Trio, with Barry Altschul at the traps - "Hues", on Impulse, testifies to their achievement - for a further year of explorations. Form is out, Rivers used to say, content makes its own form. In the early years, Jan Garbarek subscribed to a similar philosophy, played free as persuasively as any of his peers ... and with a songbird lyricism few have matched.

CD liner notes by Steve Lake



Jan Garbarek’s third album for ECM is a free, though by no means easy, trek through indeterminate territories. “Rim” breaks into light with the mournful saxophonic cries that thread the entire set. Arild Andersen dots Garbarek’s auditory cloth with almost vocal ink stains. We find Garbarek in a uniquely agitated mode, showing both great restraint and willful shifting in his performance. This is an arresting track, as sublimely depressing as it is soulful. The title denotes “frost” in Norwegian, and describes Edward Vesala’s icy percussion to a T. “Selje” (a picturesque municipality of Norway’s western coast) evokes the majestic fjords of its eponymous region, and the humble economy of its fisherfolk. Garbarek opts for the gentler flute against a thawed backdrop of bass and wind chime-like glockenspiel: a mystical aside from an otherwise forward projection.

“J.E.V.” breaks from the album’s expansive palette with a more flatly recorded sax intro. The appearance of bass and drums merely underlines the music’s hesitancy, at once assured and unaware of its future paths. “Sang” (Chant) is another subdued interlude, featuring a bass sax caught in a silken web of percussion and bass. The title track unravels like a herding song picked apart piece by piece, its remnants scattered along the base of a low mountain to the tune of an intriguing bass solo. “Etu Hei!” screeches and pounds its way into being before the Norwegian folk song “Bruremarsj” is rendered in a tense bondage of sax and bowed bass, closing with a flutter of wing beats in the final drum break.

In spite of its many abstractions, Triptykon is rife with melody and movement. It’s almost as if a distant relative were singing traditional tunes that everyone else in the family has forgotten. Though drunk with nostalgia and slurred speech, his voice is so genuine that one can hardly fault him for straying a bit off the beaten path. With repeated listenings, one begins to distinguish such thematic material from its improvised surroundings, thereby rendering any challenges this album sets before us much deeper in their returns.

ECM Records



Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek took several intriguing stylistic turns early in his career, none more extreme than that shown on "Triptykon". While he had always shown an affinity for the work of Albert Ayler and other free jazz musicians who came of age in the '60s, his prior albums retained a more straight-ahead rhythmic drive and more than a passing nod to experimental rock and fusion. Here, he jettisoned guitarist Terje Rypdal and replaced the sometimes overly delicate percussion work of Jon Christensen with the more earthy and heavy sounding Edward Vesala. The result is an expressionist trio drawing on both free improvisation and Scandinavian folk tunes, roaring, stumbling, and reeling, evoking an aural equivalent of Edvard Munch. Garbarek's work on all his reeds is assured and imaginative, even as the context is often dark and bleak. In particular, his soprano playing - as on the title track - is remarkably poignant, and it's not difficult to conjure up images of keening water birds patrolling the sub-Arctic fjords. The closing folk song, "Bruremarsj," is a drunkenly striding marvel that Ayler would've loved. "Witchi-Tai-To", Garbarek's next album for ECM, would his aesthetic high point, but "Triptykon" isn't very far behind. Highly recommended.

Brian Olewnick - All Music Guide




"...beispielhaft dichte Gruppenimprovisationen, die auf jeden unnötigen Ton verzichten. Die Musiker, die sich alle harmonischen und rhythmischen Freiheiten nehmen, lassen sich vom Charme eines Folk-Songs ebenso inspirieren wie von Albert Aylers assoziativem und universellen Denken. Musik: sehr gut."

H. Lachner in HiFiVision 10/92
 

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