1968 · Album
I Took Up The Runes
Recorded 1968 · ECM Records · Produced by Manfred Eicher
Norwegian Saxophonist Embraces Mystical Inquiry
Garbarek's tenor saxophone cuts through folk melodies like winter light through Nordic mist.
Jan Garbarek had already established himself as a serious improviser when he recorded I Took Up The Runes, and this album shows him at a crossroads—pulling away from straightforward jazz interpretation toward something more rooted in Scandinavian folk traditions and spiritual questioning. The title itself hints at this: he's not just playing jazz anymore, he's investigating something older, something that feels connected to Nordic mythology and landscape. The music reflects this shift directly. His tenor saxophone still has that characteristic thin, reedy quality that some find beautiful and others find austere, but here it's deployed across arrangements that blend jazz harmony with folk melodies and modal thinking. The approach feels more compositional and less about blowing changes, which might disappoint listeners expecting standard Garbarek post-bop workouts.
What makes this record worth hearing is precisely this awkwardness, this refusal to stay in lane. Garbarek wasn't interested in becoming a polished mainstream player, and he wasn't interested in abstract free jazz either. Instead, he was chasing something personal—a sound that could hold both Norwegian folk sensibility and jazz improvisation without either canceling the other out. The tunes have an unusual quality, neither quite folk nor quite jazz standard, and his phrasing reflects this hybridity. This is neither his best work nor his most immediately accessible record, but it's genuinely interesting as a document of an artist deliberately moving away from expected trajectories.
If you're already committed to Garbarek's music, this is essential listening for understanding how his later work developed. If you're new to him, start with something like Witchi-Tai-To (1973) first—it's more fully realized and less tentative. But I Took Up The Runes matters because it captures an artist genuinely searching, and that search has real artistic integrity even when the results feel incomplete.
Who's playing
Eberhard Weberbass
Rainer Brüninghauspiano
Jan Garbareksaxophone
Bugge Wesseltoftsynthesizer
Manu Katchédrums
Naná Vasconcelospercussion
Where next?
More by Jan Garbarek
All 15 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
