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50 great moments in jazz: Jan Garbarek, ECM Records and the 70s European renaissance

From the late-60s onward, European jazz musicians began to look to their own cultural tradition. The first steps were tentative, but by the mid-70s they had become giant strides

Eberhard Weber, the jazz-raised German electric bassist, is reputed to have told his band in the mid-70s, "you can play anything, as long as it doesn't sound like jazz". Weber's view marked a seismic shift in the music's development - toward Europe as a source of fresh ideas, and away from the received wisdom that jazz invariably had to sound like something that had first been forged in Chicago or New York.

This series has inevitably concentrated on six decades of mercurial musical evolution in the United States – jazz's birthplace, because of a unique collision of American, European, and African cultures and traditions on that continent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But from the late 1960s onward, European musicians – widely perceived up to that decade as skilful but obedient jazz disciples – began to look to their own cultural traditions, personal experiences and playing partnerships to open up paths of their own. The first steps were tentative, but by the mid-1970s they had become giant strides, and a generation of players emerged that reshaped the course of jazz all over the world.

When I first encountered Eberhard Weber's 1975 album Yellow Fields I recall being struck that everything about it seemed different, from the sound to the sleeve-art. The cover was a primitive painting of trees in an empty landscape, a long way from the iconic Blue Note images of rugged sax-players – in button-down collars and gangster hats, and probably leaning on chrome-encrusted cars – I was used to. And though the music clearly connected to post-Coltrane American jazz, it was spacious, patient, meditative and richly textural, and seemed to draw its lyricism from folk melodies very different from the blues. In an interview with Jan Garbarek years later (Eberhard Weber's ECM Records label-mate and one of the most distinctive European players to emerge on to the world stage in the 70s) the Norwegian saxophonist recalled his stylistic transition to me this way:

"I suddenly realised," Garbarek said, "that the phrase I was about to play was exactly like such-and-such that was usually played at that moment, having been drawn there because the musical surroundings I was involved in were exactly like that sort of approach, right out of the jazz tradition. That was a very uneasy feeling, to find that I no longer wanted to do that. I stopped for a while, didn't play much. I learned from Miles Davis, that if you do stop, leave space for what others are doing, you get ideas."

Garbarek was describing a mood of change sweeping over European jazz from the mid-1960s on, a growing creative confidence and urge toward independence that Munich record-producer Manfred Eicher, the founder of ECM, so astutely tuned into. But it wasn't restricted to the often folk-inflected and low-key music of the north Europeans – in England, former art-student Mike Westbrook had begun splashing his own colours over the American big-band tradition in the company of rising stars like the saxophonist John Surman, and jazz material in the UK was steadily moving from Broadway standards to original composing. The innovations of American free-improvisers like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor were encouraging like-minded free-fall experimenters all over Europe, not only to develop their own methods, but also alternative infrastructures to challenge the dominance of established jazz promoters and record labels. Some of the newcomers were closer to the jazz tradition than others, but they were all plugging into an expanding network of kindred spirits – as well as to increasingly open-minded public arts-funding provisions – all over the continent as the 1970s dawned.

ECM Records founder Manfred Eicher, a one-time double-bassist, had been involved in the production of German saxist and painter Peter Brotzmann's free-jazz burn-up Machine Gun in May 1968, a fiery conjunction of radical British, Dutch and German musicians. Eicher then encountered Norway's Jan Garbarek, a young saxophonist who had been studying with American expatriate American composer George Russell (Russell called Garbarek "the most original voice in European jazz since Django Reinhardt"), was intrigued by John Coltrane's interest in Indian music, and by the timbral advances of shortlived American tenorist Albert Ayler.

In 1970, Eicher produced Garbarek's Afric Pepperbird, a mix of electric fusion (through the sound of impressionistic rock guitarist Terje Rypdal) and free-jazz. Among many other exploratory young European artists from jazz, experimental-rock and contemporary-classical backgrounds, the open-minded Eicher then discovered German classical cellist-turned-electric bassist Eberhard Weber - not only a musician but a theatre and TV director who perceived music-making through its connections with drama and the evocation of visual imagery. Weber wanted a band that played with an understated rhythmic approach, textures drawn from rock and the new electronics, and a flowing melodic sense - while still improvising.

ECM, financially secured by its best-selling release of Keith Jarrett's Koln Concert album, went on to become one of the world's most creative and influential labels, which it remains. Its output has been immensely diverse, but Garbarek's haunting, voice-like saxophone sound and slow-burn unfolding of a musical narrative, seems to represent its vision especially vividly. Garbarek has worked in many settings, on ventures with Indian musicians, with Gregorian chanters, and with American jazz stars including Keith Jarrett and Bill Frisell, but his presence is audible from his first notes, whatever the context. At the top of this article is a sample of that inimitable sound, with Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous and American drummer Peter Erskine, on a theme called Jumper.

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