Ecm Records
2002
:Rarum II - Selected Recordings
About This Album
Jan Garbarek is the quintessential ECM artiste -- adventurous; disdainful of categories; in possession of a wailing tone well-suited to producer Manfred Eicher's reverberant, airy sonic tastes; and a devotee of the school of wide open spaces without clutter. The latter two points are important, for they unify what might otherwise be a wildly scattered collection of shooting asteroids into a single orbit. Giving all of this eclecticism some general shape, disc one of Garbarek's Rarum volume deals with his sessions as a leader, often with the ethereal mood in play, while the second disc is devoted to the Norwegian saxophonist's collaborations with his celebrated friends from Europe and America over a 22-year span. The first disc has a carefully terraced sense of flow from start to finish, with the opening horn calls of "Skrik & Hyl" and "Viddene" sounding as if they came from high on a mountaintop, with bass, then guitar, then pipe organ as backdrops. With "Lillekort," things get moving in a light Brazilian bag with Nana Vasconcelos providing the groove and the nicely striding "It's OK to Listen to the Gray Voice." The set then veers into some ethereal solo tracks, where Garbarek works with tapes of himself on excerpts from the albums All Those Born With Wings and Legend of the Seven Dreams and reaches a peak of energy on the penultimate track, the title tune of the Twelve Moons album.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 2,3,4,5 and 6)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 1,4,6,9 and 10)

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