Collection: Jon Christensen

Jon Christensen won the Norwegian Jazz Amateur Competition at seventeen, began working with visiting American musicians in Oslo's clubs shortly after, and by the mid-1960s was a regular collaborator of composer George Russell alongside a group of young Norwegian improvisers that included Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal, and Arild Andersen. Their ECM debut as a Garbarek-led quartet, "Afric Pepperbird" (1970), was among the label's earliest releases and proved to be the first of around seventy albums Christensen would record for Manfred Eicher over the following five decades. His drum concept was unusual in ways that are easier to hear than describe: he spoke of playing in waves rather than beats, of colouring music the way a horn player phrases, and the dry, precise ping of his 22-inch Istanbul K ride cymbal became so associated with the ECM sound that it is difficult to hear one without thinking of the other. The Garbarek-Bobo Stenson Quartet recordings of the mid-1970s, "Witchi-Tai-To" (1974) and "Dansere" (1976), and then the Keith Jarrett Belonging Quartet albums, "Belonging" (1974) and "My Song" (1977), represent his most collected sideman work. His name also appears across ECM records by Ralph Towner, Eberhard Weber, Enrico Rava, Charles Lloyd, Tomasz Stanko, and many others.