Jan Garbarek

CD version. Places is an album by Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, recorded in Oslo in December 1977 and released by ECM in September 1978. It stands as one of his strongest statements as a player. The quartet has no bassist, and John Taylor's organ carries the low end and the harmony. With the Americans Jack DeJohnette and Bill Connors in the line-up, the record also drew significant attention in the US.

Garbarek plays saxophones throughout, Taylor organ and piano, Connors guitar and DeJohnette drums. Taylor, an English pianist, was also recording for ECM at the time in the trio Azimuth. Connors had played electric guitar in Chick Corea's Return to Forever, then turned to acoustic guitar for his first solo album on the label in 1975. The album was made at Talent Studio with Manfred Eicher producing and Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering. In the same month and studio Garbarek and DeJohnette also played on Connors's own Of Mist and Melting, with Gary Peacock on bass. All four pieces on Places are Garbarek's, and three of them run past eleven minutes, so each idea has time to settle.

The fifteen-minute Reflections opens with saxophone and organ circling each other, Taylor holding long chords and bass lines while Connors adds sharp, struck figures on guitar. Going Places rides on DeJohnette's steady pulse, rising and falling in waves, easing back for a guitar solo and swelling again at Garbarek's calls. Passing rests on an organ ostinato with Connors's guitar line out front and Garbarek climbing above it, and returns at the end to the sound of the opening.

Down Beat heard this "eerie, desolate, bleak" music in detail, noting that Taylor plays sustained chords "much more like Lutheran church music than, say, Jimmy Smith". The same review described DeJohnette concentrating on cymbals and called Garbarek the only real solo voice, ornamenting notes with precise bends and slurs. Reviewing Places in 1978, Don Heckman wrote in High Fidelity that Garbarek was "easily the best sax player to emerge from Europe in the last decade."

This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1118, of the album first released in September 1978.