JAN GARBAREK AND THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE - Officium

Jan Garbarek's music, as critics Richard Cook and Brian Morton—authoritative authors of the monumental "Penguin Guide" to jazz recordings—once put it, is "sculptural in impact", meaning it rises before the listener like a sonic monument, acoustically speaking.

His suave, celestial style has been the key that unlocked the birth and development of ambient-jazz.

Garbarek, with "Officium", recorded in 1993 and released in 1994, sanctified jazz and freed the propulsive force of Gregorian chant from the original feeling of fear toward God and sin in which the genre was born.

The work in question consists of 15 tracks for vocal ensemble by composers active over a 300-year span, no earlier than 1200 and no later than 1500. The album thus traces a historical survey of landmark compositions in choral polyphony, from the first "tentative" developments of unison monophony for multiple voices to the complexity of the harmonic interweaving of later centuries.

The three most representative pieces from a philological and historical standpoint are unquestionably: first in chronological order, "Beata Viscera", dating from around 1200, by Master Perotin, founder of the Notre Dame school and forerunner of sacred polyphony; followed by "O Salutaris Hostia" by Pierre De La Rue, who lived between 1460 and 1518, and finally "Parce Mihi Domine" by Cristobal De Morales, who lived between 1550 and 1553, a piece featured here in no fewer than three versions—one vocal, two instrumental-and-vocal—with variations in the presence of Garbarek's sax (baritone and tenor).

In "Beata Viscera" polyphony takes its first step, appearing here in pure, primitive form, with an effect of indissoluble stability—an emotional effect that aligns the piece with the great Gothic cathedrals, the dominant visual protagonists of the era across Central Europe and northern Italy.

Here the voices sustain their notes, breaking away from the mechanical ad libitum repetition known up to that point.

"O Salutaris Hostia" by Pierre De La Rue instead marks the second step in the historical path traced by Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, a transitional phase: there are still no distinct, independent melodic lines, even though the piece follows the rules of modern harmony—that is, each voice acts in relation to the other (the sound arises from this relationship) in terms of pitch variation, but the melody's tempo is observed uniformly by all the voices.

"Parce Mihi Domine", differences of interpretation between versions aside, represents the full realization of polyphony: the choir's intricate interweavings are like curves in parallel dimensions that only cohere through the artifice of the listening ear—voices that seem to stretch into infinity as they rise in pitch, and to resound through the low voices of Gordon Jones (baritone), which "ground" the upper voices, exploding into a monumental vertical wave, all in symbiosis with one another.

The Norwegian jazzman's saxophone adapts to the various pieces with rare temperance and restraint, always steering clear of kitsch, sacrificing any ambition to play the virtuoso hero of his instrument, and instead focusing his efforts on the music as a whole, on the art of the work rather than on showing off his own skill or indulging in self-glorification. Common to every track on the album is the unmistakable style of his instrument, expressed through the high tones and sustained notes that made him famous.

In the first piece described, and in those from the same period, his sax is discreet, always intense, but never pressing or insistent. The instrument stays true to the historical context in which the various compositions took shape, amplifying their emotional responses—whether they are bold, with more developed and fully realized lines, or unison and more contained; in the latter case, following their greater simplicity and sonic concentration.

In "O Salutaris Hostia" and pieces from the same period, the quintessentially jazz instrument becomes less muted than in compositions from earlier centuries, bolder, venturing into more striking and unusual harmonies, as well as more complex and articulated melodies, whereas in the older compositions it consisted of shorter, less frequent interjections.

Unchanged throughout the album is the rightness of its presence, the sublime harmonic relationship—never out of place—that it establishes with the choir.

In "Parce Mihi Domine" and contemporaneous pieces, where the maturation of the vocal genre reaches completion, the sax is even bolder, stronger, almost brusque and violent, yet, once again, however unusual and unprecedented, it remains permanently coherent with the whole.

In modern polyphony the sax is more at ease, freer, being an instrument that only came into existence in the mid-19th century. It's as if it allows itself more, like a woman gradually revealing herself, growing ever more beautiful (the sax being the sensual instrument par excellence), ever more indispensable, to the point where the lover (in this case, the listener) simply cannot do without it any longer.

The album is an emotional expansion that explodes into an immense, superhuman intensity, transcendent, divine. A work with a soul so sincere and pure that it stands as the counterpart to the pagan, physical and vulgarly temporal (in the sense of "vulgo", the people) jazz-world of Jon Hassell, from the very early '70s onward; a new-age music that, when it succeeds (listen above all to "Vernal Equinox", "Earthquake Island", "Dream Theory In Malaya" and "AkaDarbariJava"), has opened new doors in the history of music.

Garbarek & Hilliard offer nirvana and catharsis for the religious spirit, Hassell for the senses physically reactive to natural forms. To put it more clearly, the former are the soundtrack of the monk and the philosopher; the latter the soundtrack of the mountaineer, the explorer and the pioneer. The former transcendent and deductive (deductive reasoning) like Plato and Plotinus, meant in the sense of artists who extol the search for the beyond and the not-evident; the latter immanent and inductive (inductive or scientific reasoning) like Kant and Nietzsche, meant in the sense of a music-maker who exalts, as muse and truth, natural reality, unhidden, clearly visible, real.

"Officium" is a constant, taut and poignant inner chord stretched toward the sky, vertical and spiritual; more simply, the new-age and ambient-jazz masterpiece of the decade.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

24/02/2009