Jan Garbarek

Saxophonist Jan Garbarek crafts a brooding, electronic-tinged song without words on In Praise of Dreams, one of his most cohesive and atmospheric latter-day recordings. Rather than a conventional blowing session, the album is conceived as a single sustained mood, an unbroken nocturnal landscape built from Garbarek's keening soprano and tenor lines, his own keyboards and subtle programming, and two superbly chosen partners. Violist Kim Kashkashian brings a dark, vocal lyricism that shadows and answers the saxophone, while drummer Manu Katché supplies a supple, understated pulse that propels the music without ever disrupting its dreamlike stillness. The interplay between viola and saxophone is the heart of the record, two singing voices winding around one another over slow-moving electronic textures and cinematic atmospheres. Garbarek has always been a master of space and northern melancholy, and here he distills those qualities into something close to ambient chamber music, glacial yet deeply emotional.

The result drifts between film-score grandeur and intimate reflection, hypnotic and unmistakably ECM in its clarity and depth. For listeners drawn to the meeting point of jazz, contemporary composition and electronics, In Praise of Dreams is a spacious, immersive and quietly moving experience that rewards repeated, undistracted listening. It stands among the most fully realized of Garbarek's later recordings, a culmination of the atmospheric, texture-led direction he had been pursuing for years. On vinyl the album's deep, slow-building soundscapes unfold with particular richness, making it an ideal late-night listen for admirers of ambient and modern jazz alike.