Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek has been playing to full houses for 40 years - By Wolf Kampmann

Few jazz musicians have been so adored for so long in Germany as Jan Garbarek. His wistful music leads the listener into idealized worlds - and is especially popular with women.

Jazz is still very much a male thing - go to a gig in Germany and quite often, the audience will mostly be made up of graying men. But there is one musician who has over the decades eroded one of the last of the masculine strongholds: saxophonist Jan Garbarek. He plays to crowds that are mostly female. So what is his secret?

Perhaps it's that touch of perpetuity that resonates in his music, and also in the latest CD released by the Jan Garbarek Group titled "Dresden." Naming the band's first live album for 40 years after a German city is Garabek's way of paying tribute to the country that has formed the backbone of his international success: Nowhere has the musician, now 63 years old, enjoyed such unswerving loyalty as here in Germany. And it all began with a chance meeting in Germany at the start of his career.

In 1969, the as yet unknown Norwegian made some recordings with his octet and began looking around for a signing. The brash proponent of free jazz took a tape of the recordings along with him wherever he performed. During a festival in Italy, he got talking to an introverted German with a moustache who happened to be setting up a record label.

"I asked him if he might be interested in my tapes," recalls Garbarek four decades later. "He declined but said he would be interested in making his own recordings with us. He said he would call us when he was ready and I thought I wouldn't hear from him again. But a few weeks later, we received a letter." Producer Manfred Eicher was indeed on his way from Munich to Oslo to produce the LP "Afric Pepperbird" for his new label ECM. The record went on to be a big hit.

Garbarek was by no means the first Norwegian helped by Eicher to secure a commercial breakthrough but that doesn't offer a clue in explaining the success of this particular saxophonist in Germany. He is one of very few jazz musicians who has been playing to full houses for 40 years, even though he regularly performs in Germany. With his languorous tone, a tendency to dramatize and glorify and an unobtrusive attentiveness, he comes close to some of the great moments of German music since the Romantic period.

Garbarek enjoys playing beautifully but his acknowledgement of beauty is free of kitsch. His music is clear and full of energy; at the same time it exudes an aura of spirituality and infinity. And this is the secret of the immense seductive power of his albums and performances. This is what the jazz troubadour himself says: "Beauty describes everything that is right for a particular moment. If you find the right expression for a moment in time, that's wonderful. You can also opt for something quite ugly but if it's the right choice for the moment, then it can nevertheless be beautiful."

It's surprising to hear sentences such as these from an aesthete like Garbarek. But he knows exactly what he can expect from his audience. Beneath the polished sheen of his sound lies an underbelly of raw emotion. "Pretty and beautiful are not the same thing," he says. "Pretty can actually even be very boring. That always has something to do with your own personal threshold." For him beauty means change. It's been a long time since he sought perfection through free playing. Today, he finds freedom in the variation of nuances.

His music attests to a tenderness that has nothing in common with the stale studio atmosphere of many jazz productions. Like an upholder of sensuousness, he has always set himself apart from all conventions of the genre. When free jazz was at its apogee, he looked to world music for inspiration. And as these concepts threatened to choke in the global village monotony of the 1980s, he switched to fusion and the Middle Ages. The sensitive perfectionist always followed his inner compass. For sure, he polarizes and his sound isn't radical enough for jazz purists. Despite this, he manages to open doors where others are putting up barricades.

Most of his listeners don't care if Garbarek's music is being called jazz or not. Women in particular allow themselves to be embraced by his gentle sound and carried off into idealized worlds by the unobtrusive pulse of his music. His compositions are like stories that allow the associations of his audience to run wild. And that is what his fans love about him most.