Jan Garbarek, The Hilliard Ensemble

Remember Me, My Dear is the final album of the partnership between Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, which Manfred Eicher set up in 1993. It was recorded live in October 2014 on the farewell tour of the Officium project, shortly before the British vocal quartet retired after a forty-year career. Released twenty-five years after Officium, it shows how early music, contemporary composition and improvisation met in their concerts.

The singers are countertenor David James, tenors Rogers Covey-Crump and Steven Harrold and baritone Gordon Jones, with Garbarek on soprano saxophone. The concert took place in the Chiesa della Collegiata dei Santi Pietro e Stefano in Bellinzona, in the RSI Rete Due series Tra jazz e nuove musiche. Michael Rast recorded it and mixed it with Eicher, the producer, at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano. The programme draws on the three studio albums, Officium, Mnemosyne and Officium Novum, and adds Procurans odium, a medieval song from the Benediktbeuern monastery.

The concert opens with Ov zarmanali, an Armenian hymn by Komitas, where Garbarek plays alone into the church's long reverberation before the voices enter. In Pérotin's Alleluia nativitas the saxophone solos freely over a repeated vocal figure, and the piece leads into Hildegard von Bingen's O ignis spiritus and Garbarek's own We are the stars. Arvo Pärt's Most Holy Mother of God is sung by the quartet alone, the saxophone slipping in only on the last chord. There is also Nikolai Kedrov's Litany, a Brumel Agnus Dei and Garbarek's Allting finns on a poem by Pär Lagerkvist. The anonymous sixteenth-century Scottish song that gives the album its title closes the set.

In The Observer, Fiona Maddocks called the album "not for purists, but offering its own singular and hard-won purity". Rob Cowan wrote in Gramophone that it concludes "a four-album trans-millennial tale that helped define meaningful music for a generation". Andy Hamilton, in Jazz Journal (2019), acknowledged critics who never accepted Garbarek's role, yet judged it remarkable that the group succeeded at improvising against medieval vocal music at all.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2625, released on 18 October 2019, with liner notes by Paul Griffiths, Steve Lake and Gordon Jones.