Collection: Jan Garbarek

Jan Garbarek grew up in Mysen, Norway, won an amateur jazz competition in 1962 at fifteen, and spent much of the following decade working with American composer George Russell, who was based in Scandinavia for an extended period during the 1960s and whose harmonic theories left a clear mark on how Garbarek approached structure and space. His ECM debut, "Afric Pepperbird" (1970), recorded with guitarist Terje Rypdal, bassist Arild Andersen, and drummer Jon Christensen, announced a tenor saxophone sound that had absorbed Ornette Coleman's freedom while arriving somewhere entirely its own: sharp-edged, glacial in tone, built around long notes and deliberate silences, and carrying a quality that critics and listeners immediately reached for landscape metaphors to describe. No saxophonist has been more completely identified with a single label. His association with Keith Jarrett's European quartet from the mid-1970s, documented on "Belonging" (ECM, 1974) and "My Song" (ECM, 1977), brought him to a wider audience, but the quartet recordings he made as a leader during the same period, particularly "Witchi-Tai-To" (ECM, 1974) and "Dansere" (ECM, 1976) with the Bobo Stenson Quartet, are what collectors concentrate on. His 1980s work with Eberhard Weber on bass, and guitarists Bill Frisell and David Torn, shifted the sound toward world music and ambient territory; "Officium" (ECM, 1994), a meeting with the Hilliard Ensemble built around medieval and Renaissance polyphony, became ECM's best-selling album of all time. The early to mid-1970s ECM records are the ones most sought-after on original vinyl.