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Jan Garbarek rose to international fame in the mid-1970s playing with Keith Jarrett's European Quartet, which released the albums Belonging, My Song and the live recordings Personal Mountains, Nude Ants, and Sleeper. Such collaborations, in the words of Jarrett’s biographer, Ian Carr, took “the art of classic jazz to its highest pinnacle”.
Officium, one of the most significant recordings of Garbarek’s career – and in the history of ECM – was made in 1993 in St Gerold monastery in Austria with the Hilliard Ensemble. Garbarek’s sax – a “fifth voice” – weaves soaring, swooping lines around the polyphony of the vocal quartet, creating effects that are as entrancing as they are unexpected.
First released in 1994, Officium was truly ground-breaking in so many aspects, particularly its marrying of jazz and contemporary music with 12th to 16th century liturgical works by composers Cristobal de Morales and Perotinus Magnus. Today, it remains a modern classic and an ode to restless musical imaginations.
