When The Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek gathered at the monastery of St. Gerold in the Austrian mountains they could not have known where that time-defying experiment, inspired by the Officium Defunctorum of Morales would lead, and did not suspect that it would strike such a resonant chord with the public at large. And although the project had seemed, at least on paper, predestined to outrage the proprieties of two sets of purists - the custodians of early music "authenticity" and defenders of the jazz tradition - the recording was almost unanimously hailed by the press as an artistic triumph. "Sobering and soaring," the Herald Tribune called it. "Ice-warm, as it were. And the texture is so enveloping that you don't want to listen to anything less pure than Bach or Billie Holiday afterward." "At its most magical," said the New York Observer, "Garbarek's soprano sax insinuates itself almost imperceptibly into the top line of countertenor, David James, collapsing all barriers between 'jazz' and 'classical', the sacred and the profane, antiquity and now." The Guardian: "Garbarek's purity of intonation, and the sensitivity with which he spikes it with atonality have rarely been better captured on disc and, far from being a deliberate exercise in musical exotica, this often sounds like the setting that was just waiting to find him." There was, and remains, something very right about this combination, the depth and clarity of medieval polyphony in particular providing a context that rules out a mannered response from the freely moving "fifth voice" that is Garbarek's saxophone. The Norwegian player's improvising with the Hilliard singers is amongst his most essential and concentrated work: every tone is made to count.
Over the last twenty years, Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble have given hundreds of concerts together in the concert halls and, especially, churches of the world, and the music has changed with the repertoire. Many new pieces have been added, most recently influences from Eastern Europe, and the freedoms that Garbarek habitually takes with the music have emboldened the Hilliard singers also to take more chances, both in selection of material and its treatment.