Jan Garbarek Group

Wayfarer is the second album by the Jan Garbarek Group with guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Eberhard Weber, recorded in Oslo in 1983, a year after Paths, Prints. On that earlier record the drummer was Jon Christensen. Here the Norwegian saxophonist returns with the same guitar and bass, a new drummer and six new compositions of his own.

The quartet recorded at Talent Studio in Oslo in March 1983, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. Garbarek plays tenor and soprano saxophones. The new name in the line-up is the American drummer and percussionist Michael DiPasqua, who took over from Christensen; he had already worked with Weber and Frisell a year earlier on Weber's Later That Evening. Weber had been an ECM regular since the 1970s, while Frisell was at the start of his career, with his own debut album, In Line, released by ECM the same year.

The title track, more than nine minutes long, starts as a slow, dark crawl and builds into some of the most intense drumming on the album, with Frisell working along its edges. Pendulum, at over ten minutes the longest piece, gives the guitarist plenty of room to stretch. Between them sits Gentle, just over five minutes, where Weber's bass is the voice that shapes the piece, and the record ends with Spor (Norwegian for trace) and the brief Singsong.

Writing on ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo singled out the title track and heard in Weber "a fluid foil to Garbarek's scalpeled lines", though he found the themes themselves relatively weak. The music held up on stage: reviewing a Garbarek quartet concert in Brighton for Jazz Journal in January 1985, Michael Tucker noted the aggressive edge of the latter stages of the Wayfarer suite. The next group album, It's OK to Listen to the Gray Voice, followed in 1985 with a new guitarist.

This is the CD edition of ECM 1259, an album first released on 1 September 1983. It keeps the six-track running order of the original LP, about 46 minutes of music.