Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble waited nearly five years before trying to follow up their surprisingly successful Officium album, but finally they came through with an even more adventurous two-CD set of jazzman-meets-early-music-voices. Here, their range straddles no less than three milleniums (just missing a fourth by a couple of years), from the "Delphic Paean" of Athenaeus circa 127 B.C. to a lullaby by the contemporary Estonian composer Veljo Tormis, with intervening contributions by Hildegard von Bingen, William Billings, and Thomas Tallis, Iroquois Indians, Basque and Peruvian folksongs, and many more far-flung choices. Most daringly, the four voices themselves now start to improvise on scraps of ancient material culled from old book bindings and the like, though it's hard to determine exactly where this occurs (probably during some passages of wordless vocalise). Ultimately, despite the freer methods, the results are often pretty much the same as Officium on disc one -- soothing, timeless sonic frescos reverberantly recorded in the same Austrian St. Gerold monastery, with Garbarek soaring over or threading through the texture ever more sparingly. Yet on disc two, Garbarek and the Hilliards start to move into other worlds, breaking into something more disturbing and even atonal in that ancient "Delphic Paean," the syncopated harmonies of Garbarek's own "Loiterando," or a strange-sounding Russian Psalm from the 16th century. This is a collaboration in transition, and one hopes it will continue to evolve. ~ Richard S. Ginell

Mnemosyne is an intriguing mix of the old and the new: the legendary Hilliard Ensemble performing a wide selection of music ranging from Dufay to Tallis to Peruvian or Native American sources accompanied by Jan Garbarek who provides a modern backdrop with his saxophone improvisations.

Garbarek does not so much solo as provide ornamentation to the works. Weaving in and around the vertical writing and austere nature of the written music, Garbarek appears as a musician soaring in and around the formal patterns of the vocal parts.

One of the more adventurous couplings is 'Delphic Poem' wherein the fusion of saxophone and voices comes across first as a sonic, meditative wash of sound and then later accompanied by some wild flights from Garbarek. Other standouts include 'Mascarades' for Garbarek's foghorn-like effects and 'Eagle Dance' for the Native American styling from both the wordless setting of the Hilliard and Garbarek's florid emulation of birdcalls. Stark, spare, and evocative are the key words to sum up this masterful collection.