Creativity Quote by Jan Garbarek

Jazz has always been sold as freedom, but Garbarek is pointing to its other truth: it comes with a dialect. "Phraseology" is a musician's polite way of saying accent, a set of inherited gestures - the swing-inflected turn of a line, the bluesy bend, the sanctioned ways of landing on a note so it reads as jazz rather than just improvised music. By calling it "a certain phraseology", he acknowledges jazz as a language community with rules, not a vibe you can simply declare.

"I've moved away" does a lot of quiet work. It's not a denunciation of jazz; it's a refusal to perform fluency for its own sake. Garbarek came up in a European scene where American jazz was both bible and burden, and his signature sound - long, clear, almost vocal sax lines, lots of space, folk modalities, the famous ECM hush - often sidesteps the idioms that signal bebop legitimacy. The subtext is aesthetic and political: he doesn't want his music to be heard as a well-executed imitation, or to be graded against a canon whose center of gravity is elsewhere.

The sentence also anticipates the inevitable purist objection. If jazz is defined by its phraseology, leaving that behind risks being told you're no longer playing jazz at all. Garbarek answers by not arguing; he simply repositions. It's a claim for an improviser's right to choose a different mother tongue, and a reminder that "authenticity" in jazz can be as much about recognizable syntax as it is about risk.