Jan Garbarek

CD version. Luminessence is a set of three pieces by Keith Jarrett for string orchestra and saxophone, with Jan Garbarek as the only soloist. Jarrett composed the music but does not play on the record. He wrote the orchestral frames with Garbarek's sound in mind and left the saxophonist free to improvise across them. The result is one of the most personal early statements of the Norwegian's style. It was recorded in 1974 and released by ECM in 1975.

The sessions took place on 29 and 30 April 1974 at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg. Only days earlier Jarrett and Garbarek had recorded Belonging in Oslo with Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen. Garbarek plays tenor and soprano saxophone. The strings are those of the Südfunk Symphony Orchestra of Stuttgart, conducted by Mladen Gutesha. Kurt Rapp and Martin Wieland engineered the recording, and Manfred Eicher produced it.

Numinor, almost fourteen minutes long, opens slowly, the strings moving into place before the saxophone enters with a voice-like cry. The shorter Windsong ends in a passage where the saxophone blends into the strings rather than standing in front of them. The title track, over fifteen minutes and played on tenor throughout, moves through clear triadic harmony with taut, rhythmically suspended string writing beneath Garbarek's long lines. There is no rhythm section, so the pulse comes from the orchestra and from the phrasing of the soloist.

In his Jarrett biography Ian Carr observed that Jarrett's melodies here sound like Garbarek improvisations, such was the rapport between the two. Reviewing the album with five stars in DownBeat, the critic Berg called it "a chilling singular achievement that promises to stand as a landmark in the musical landscape of the '70s". Writing in Jazz Journal in 2024, Michael Tucker described it as "the definitive early example" of Garbarek's mix of melodic directness and chromatic sophistication. He also heard its mood foreshadowed in Solstice, the closing piece of Belonging.

This is the CD edition of ECM 1049, first released in 1975. It keeps the original running order of three pieces, about thirty-five minutes of music in all.