Agnes Buen Garnås, Jan Garbarek

Rosensfole brings together the Telemark ballad singer Agnes Buen Garnås and the saxophonist Jan Garbarek in a set of medieval songs from Norway. Garnås sings the old ballads in the traditional manner, while Garbarek surrounds her voice with newly written arrangements for saxophones, percussion and synthesizers. Released by ECM in 1989, it was distributed internationally. It remains one of ECM's clearest meetings of an oral tradition with studio sound.

Garnås (1946-2024) came from a family of tradition bearers. Her father, Anders Buen, played the Hardanger fiddle, and her mother, Margit Tjønn, was a kvedar, a singer of the old ballads. In 1984 her recording of Draumkvedet had won the Spellemannprisen. For this album Garbarek plays soprano and tenor saxophones, synthesizers and percussion, and he arranged all the traditional material. The music was recorded between September and December 1988 at Bel Studio in Oslo, with Ingar Helgesen and Ulf Holand as engineers. Garbarek and Manfred Eicher produced and mixed it together.

The programme is framed by two short pieces, Innferd and Utferd, an entrance and an exit. At its centre stands Margjit Og Targjei Risvollo, a narrative ballad of more than sixteen minutes that Garnås sustains from first verse to last. The title song is much shorter, coloured by Garbarek's percussion and synthesizer lines that recall a dulcimer. Grisilla unfolds over a drone, closer to a lullaby. The saxophones rarely take the lead. They add held chords and brief answering phrases around the vocal line.

Writing for ECM Reviews in 2012, Tyran Grillo called the record the crowning achievement of Garbarek's turn towards the past, "an album that could exist nowhere but on ECM". He also observed that the album proved "an eye-opener in Norway" for younger jazz musicians looking into their own folk heritage. Grillo noted that such explorations of the past were already present in Garbarek's work, but that with Garnås they took a new direction. She received the Lindeman Prize in 1989, the year the album appeared. He heard its influence in the work of Steve Tibbetts and of the group Vas, and paired it with Trio Mediaeval's later Folk Songs.

This is the CD edition of ECM 1402, subtitled Medieval Songs from Norway and first released in 1989, with ten traditional songs. The cover photograph is by Juozas Kazlauskas, with design by Dieter Rehm.