Damn, is he fine or what? Jan Garbarek is making the blood shift in my body when I'm supposed to be innocently blogging one of his very most incredible live performances.
Our latest episode of Music That Time Forgot involves this Norwegian saxophonist -- OK, he's technically Polish but his family fled the occupation during WWII when he was really small -- hypnotizing yet another audience about 37 or so years ago in Warsaw.
This bad boy -- worked over by the experts to make it sonically almost indistinguishable from a standard, immaculately-recorded Manfred Eicher ECM platter -- features one of our hero's greatest bands on an 80-minute voyage to stormy serenity.
I dunno if this band was ever recorded in the studio -- the Wayfarer record this tour is meant to support has Bill Frisell on it instead of David Torn -- but we thank the ROIO gods that someone (the soundman at the desk?) captured it in this sort of quality.
Speaking of David Torn, he tears this show up like a bundle of confetti at a ticker tape parade and cascades it -- in the form of highly processed notes on the guitar -- over the audience until they are marching down the Fifth Avenue of their minds in perfect step.
That said, it's time to cut the chatter and, once again, spin the platter.
Jan Garbarek Quartet
Jazz Jamboree
Sala Kongresova
Warsaw, Poland
10.23.1983
01 Skygger
02 Kite Dance
03 The Last Stage of a Long Journey
04 Footprints
05 Red Roof
06 Witchi-Tai-To
07 Entering
Total time: 1:18:41
Jan Garbarek - tenor & soprano saxophones, flute
Eberhard Weber - bass
David Torn - guitar & electronics
Michael Di Pasqua - drums
Valleybird/Tom Phillips remaster of a soundboard capture of indeterminate origin
421 MB FLAC/October 2020 archive link
I'll be back tomorrow and Sunday with stuff that couldn't be more different than this one if it had been imported from another galaxy.
Do thrill, through, to this 78 minutes of utter mayhem, delivered by musicians as skilled and sensitive as any who were alive at the time of its making.--J.
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