European jazz had grown up, and they no longer envied։ It’s all Jan Garbarek’s fault։ Videos, Photos

When I was a student abroad, I performed regularly as a jazz pianist. And I received a lot of praise. I like to think it was due to my musicality, but there was something else that contributed to my “success.”

In jazz circles, I was clearly an American. And everyone knows that great jazz comes from the United States—just like elegant watches come from Switzerland and cheese from France. I was authentic, both in terms of my place of origin and my obvious Yankee accent. And that gave me a certain distinction on the jazz scene abroad.

I loved it.

So I was hired and rehired. Everyone smiled at me. When introducing the band, the announcer always made sure to say: “Please welcome Ted Gioia at the piano—all the way from Los Angeles, California!”

They applauded a little louder at that response. Everyone loved Los Angeles back then. Okay, maybe I wasn’t a Hollywood star, but I got a little taste of what the glamour of La La Land was all about.

But when I returned a few years later, everything had changed.

I no longer received that affection. No one even bothered to mention my American heritage—they didn’t care at all. It was like discovering that stinky cheese really is stinky.

Something had changed in European jazz. The musicians there didn’t care a bit about what was happening in Los Angeles or New York. Not anymore. Instead, they only talked about their exciting jazz scene and the local musicians.

And they had a lot to talk about.

European jazz had grown, and they no longer envied us Americans. Poor Ted was mercilessly excluded.

And I knew who to blame. It was that damned Norwegian, Jan Garbarek.

Sure, there were others to blame—he hadn’t done it all alone. But Garbarek was the leader and the role model. He showed what European jazz looked like: proud and self-assured—unapologetic and independent of American trends and expectations. And after Garbarek, there was no going back. I would never taste that taste of Yankee glamour again.

But I probably shouldn’t blame Garbarek and all the other Europeans. He was great—and, even more than great, he had created a formidable sound all his own, freed from American influences. The result was a new pro-European atmosphere that soon spread across the continent.

I loved listening to this stuff, too, despite the personal price I’d paid. What else could I do?

Of course, Garbarek hadn’t always been so independent and detached from American trends.

I once heard a bootleg tape of Jan Garbarek playing in his teens. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He played hot hard bop as if he’d been born in Philadelphia or New York.

I’d always associated him with European chamber jazz, completely disconnected from the gravitational pull of American postbop styles. But now it’s clear that his original inspirations weren’t much different from mine. Not only did he respect American models, but he began by learning to play their most idiomatic ways.

This is evident on his first album, a rarely heard recording called Til Vigdis. It chronicles two live performances and reveals a Garbarek deeply immersed in Coltrane’s late phraseology. The opening track is a Coltrane composition, and for eighteen minutes Garbarek transforms his instrument into a perpetual motion machine, accompanied only by bass and drums.

This young saxophonist, just twenty-three, is still fascinated by John Coltrane and other American role models (particularly the iconoclast Albert Ayler). But this new sound is something different, something Nordic, something original. It wasn’t easy in 1970 for a European jazz musician to create a style that didn’t sound like an homage to his American predecessors, but Garbarek was now well on his way to doing so.

In a wonderful coincidence, Garbarek’s new record producer, Manfred Eicher, was shaping a similar vision: a European jazz record label that didn’t imitate its American competitors. Eicher is now a legend in the jazz world, but in 1970 he wasn’t even a careerist—just a complete unknown, a bassist who had launched ECM only a few months earlier.

In the years that followed, Eicher produced landmark albums by Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, and other jazz stars. More importantly, he helped launch the careers of around a hundred European jazz artists. But all of that was in the future, when he entered the studio with Jan Garbarek. African Pepperbird was his seventh album for ECM, and none of its predecessors had sold particularly well.

So I was hired and rehired. Everyone smiled at me. When introducing the band, the announcer always made sure to say: “Please welcome Ted Gioia to the piano—all the way from Los Angeles, California!”

Eicher brought Garbarek back into the studio for a new album just seven months later. The resulting work, Triptykon, not only reveals the saxophonist’s growing maturity, but also begins to define what would become known as the ECM sound.

Some describe it as “chamber jazz.” And I can understand why. It’s more nuanced music, played at a lower volume than American jazz. For this reason, it’s well-suited to the same concert halls that host string quartets and piano recitals. It’s music for those who listen attentively, rather than arguing in bars.

Something had changed in European jazz. Musicians there didn’t care a whit about what was happening in Los Angeles or New York. Not anymore. Instead, they talked only about their exciting jazz scene and local musicians.

I note that this is a very fitting choice for a German jazz label like ECM. The German-speaking world practically invented chamber music, and its cultural expectations must have seemed natural to someone like Eicher—in a way that wouldn’t have been possible for someone who grew up playing blues in a Mississippi juke joint or a New Orleans brothel.

Europe is truly different. So European jazz should reflect that.

But on another level, ECM’s, and especially Garbarek’s, definition of “chamber music” is misleading. It suggests a kind of fussy delicacy that is the exact opposite of the saxophonist’s rousing declamations on his instrument. This is why Garbarek is so effective at playing quasi-rock pieces (especially when paired with guitarist Rypdal): he always plays with intensity, though in his case that doesn’t always mean loud or flashy.

But ECM deserves credit for another innovation: the birth of a truly global and cross-border attitude toward jazz. It’s not uncommon for Eicher to feature a band with each member from a different country—or even a different continent, as happened when Garbarek recorded with Brazilian Egberto Gismonti and American Charlie Haden. The same thing happened when the saxophonist recorded with John Abercrombie and Naná Vasconcelos.

This cross-border approach was a revelation for the jazz world of the 1970s. It paved the way for Garbarek to record ECM with singer Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, Anouar Brahem, and the Hilliard Ensemble. These forays challenged the very definition of what jazz is—and in the best possible way.

All these currents began to coalesce in Garbarek’s recordings of the mid-1970s—such as the underrated Red Lanta with pianist Art Lande (1973), Dansere with pianist Bobo Stenson (1976), and Dis with guitarist Ralph Towner (1976). Each was a major statement for both the musician and the ECM label. Garbarek had now found his groove and could hold audiences mesmerized, no longer requiring all the Coltrane-esque demonstrations of his youth.

Just listen to the space, the held notes, and the crisp phrase in Dansere’s “Lokk.” This is a declaration of independence from all the American-centric flavors (free, fusion, post-bop, etc.) of the time. This represented a completely new way of playing jazz, as even Americans were now realizing.

One of those Americans was Keith Jarrett. And he soon released the most successful solo piano album in history, The Köln Concert, on the ECM label. But a few months before that historic moment, Jarrett flew to Oslo, Norway, to make an album with Garbarek’s band.

Many were perplexed. Keith Jarrett already had a quartet in the United States, and many jazz fans thought it was the best band in the world. Why would he abandon it for three unknown Scandinavians?

But the resulting album, Belonging, recorded over two days in April 1974, was destined to become a cult classic. Consider the fact that Branford Marsalis released a full-length tribute album to Belonging in 2025, performing every song from the record with his band.

Even pop stars were paying attention to Belonging—so much so that Steely Dan was sued by Jarrett for copyright infringement because the title track of Gaucho sounds so similar to “Long as You Know You’re Living Yours” from Belonging. Jarrett had a solid argument and was eventually added as a co-composer on the Steely Dan song.

Garbarek truly belonged on Belonging because he adapted to every twist and turn of Jarrett’s imaginative songwriting. He could play funky, folky, or free-spirited, depending on the situation. But even here, his Nordic tone is the main draw, almost like a lover’s call from a castle tower in a magical story, drawing the listener deeply into the music.

Jarrett was so captivated by his new collaborator that he made another album, Luminessence (1975), with Garbarek as the sole soloist, accompanied by strings. Jarrett himself doesn’t perform on the album—this is a true showcase for the saxophonist. Jarrett composed three operas, and it’s clear he’s obsessed with Garbarek’s candid, melancholic tone.

“He studied Jan’s music,” producer Manfred Eicher later explained, and the entire album was composed with “Jan” in mind. This would have been a compliment to Garbarek under any circumstances, but especially from Keith Jarrett—who usually expects musicians to adapt to him, not the other way around.

Jarrett followed up with another orchestral album, Arbour Zena—his most impressive work as a classical composer to date. This time Keith played piano, but once again he also featured Garbarek. By this time, Jarrett was already a bona fide music star with a large mainstream audience thanks to his hugely successful crossover album The Köln Concert, and he seemed determined to bring his Norwegian collaborator along on this journey.

Jarrett was now touring with his Nordic band, playing to sold-out concert halls. Some live recordings were later released, but the quartet released only one more studio album—although it remains one of the most celebrated jazz albums of the decade.

For many fans, this recording, My Song, made it clear why Jarrett joined a European band. So I’m not exaggerating when I say that this was, to some extent, a moment of legitimacy for jazz beyond the sphere of American cultural colonization.

Or listen to it in “Going Places,” where the dynamic drummer Jack DeJohnette tries to kick Jan’s Nordic ass, but Garbarek doesn’t give in. He continues to deliver his Nordic, solitary sound even as the American drummer triples the saxophone tempo—until he stops around the third minute. Then DeJohnette also decides to float to the rhythm of a fjord.

It’s like a metaphor for Garbarek’s entire career. His sax serenity flows on the surface, but he’s solid as a glacier underneath. And it’s the same in every context—there’s that European confidence again that took away all my advantages.

But Garbarek, despite his glacial hardness, was still growing. His most daring work began in his fifties. By this point, he no longer even needs jazz—at least not in the conventional sense. Now he’s a citizen of universal soundscapes with a passport that allows him to travel anywhere, anytime.

Two years later, Garbarek released a trio album with Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem and Pakistani tabla player Ustad Shaukat Hussai. Brahem wrote most of the music, and Garbarek interprets it with the same authority he had played all those Keith Jarrett compositions twenty years earlier.

Around the same time, Garbarek embarked on the most ambitious collaboration of this final phase of his career—and the most unusual of all. He began making music with the Hilliard Ensemble, a celebrated British vocal ensemble best known for its medieval and early Renaissance music.

I love this group, but its best work features liturgical music composed five hundred years ago. What good would a jazz saxophonist be? But they gathered in an Austrian monastery and took the plunge.

As Garbarek demonstrated, they were both operating on a disturbing wavelength where the adjectives modern and medieval are no longer relevant. Everything is timeless now. The music on the resulting album, Officium, is shocking, but also completely unsuitable for the format of any radio station.

One listener, trying to find a way to describe this work, put it this way: Officium is “what Coltrane hears in heaven.”

Garbarek’s recording pace slowed considerably after 2000. His new albums became rare. But he continued to collaborate with the Hilliard Ensemble until its dissolution in 2014. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this is the most personal music of his late career—and also the most mystical.

Perhaps all jazz musicians seek transcendence, but Garbarek seems to have found it—and, even better, he wants to share it with us, the rest of us. We just have to be willing to listen. And also to set aside all our preconceptions about the saxophone, jazz, genre definitions, and historical chronology.

So I’ll continue to lament the loss of America’s undisputed dominance of the jazz idiom. I enjoyed receiving that special treatment when I played in Europe, but (sigh!) it’s gone forever. Yet, Garbarek has repaid me completely by showing me what a truly expansive vision of jazz means.

No, he hasn’t taken anything away from us American jazz musicians. He truly gave us a gift—showing us possibilities in our traditions that we didn’t even know existed.

Who knows? Maybe that’s what jazz is supposed to do.

I no longer received that tender, loving care. No one even bothered to mention my Los Angeles roots—they didn’t care at all. It was like discovering that stinky cheese really is stinky.

And they had a lot to talk about.

European jazz had grown up, and they no longer envied us Americans. Poor Ted was left out in the cold. And I knew who to blame. It was that damned Norwegian Jan Garbarek.