Jan Garbarek, The Hilliard Ensemble

CD version. Officium brought together the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the British vocal quartet The Hilliard Ensemble in a programme of sacred music from Gregorian chant to the sixteenth century. The singers keep to the written lines while Garbarek improvises around them on soprano and tenor saxophones. Released in September 1994, it became one of the most successful albums ECM has ever issued and started a partnership that lasted twenty years.

The Hilliards at the time were countertenor David James, tenors Rogers Covey-Crump and John Potter, and baritone Gordon Jones. The album was recorded in September 1993 at the Propstei St. Gerold, a Benedictine monastery in the Vorarlberg region of Austria. Manfred Eicher produced, with Peter Laenger as engineer, and the booklet carries notes by Potter and Eicher. Most of the arrangements are credited jointly to Garbarek and the ensemble.

The Parce mihi domine of Cristóbal de Morales, from his Office of the Dead, frames the album. It opens the disc with saxophone, returns at the centre sung by the voices alone, and closes it with saxophone again. Between these come anonymous fourteenth- and fifteenth-century pieces, several of Czech origin, including Primo tempore, where the tenor saxophone moves like a fifth voice. There are also settings by Pérotin (Beata viscera), Pierre de la Rue and Guillaume Dufay, whose Ave maris stella sits near the end. Gordon Jones sings the Gregorian Oratio Ieremiae on his own, without saxophone.

Reviewing the album on Between Sound and Space in 2010, Tyran Grillo recalled it as the only ECM record he had ever seen advertised on television. He wrote that it "has aged beautifully" despite the criticism it drew. Writing in London Jazz News in 2015, Andrew Cartmel called it "perhaps ECM's most successful album". Both writers note that it arrived in the same year as the best-selling Chant by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. The collaboration continued with Mnemosyne (1999) and Officium Novum (2010), both recorded at St. Gerold. A last album, Remember me, my dear, was taken from the group's final tour in October 2014.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1525, first released in 1994.