Jan Garbarek was born on March 4, 1947, in Mysen, in Norway's Østfold county, the only child of Czesław Garbarek, a Polish former prisoner of war, and Kari Nordbø, a Norwegian. He grew up in Oslo and was stateless until about the age of seven, because Norway did not then grant citizenship automatically. At fourteen he heard John Coltrane on the radio, bought a saxophone instruction book before he owned an instrument, and learned the fingerings on paper. American players who passed through Scandinavia, among them Dexter Gordon and Ben Webster, shaped his ear, and in 1962 he won a competition for amateur jazz players and formed his own band. He played with Don Cherry in 1964, joined the singer Karin Krog's group (he is on her 1966 album Jazz Moments), and made his first record under his own name, Til Vigdis, in 1967. In 1968 he received the Buddyprisen, a Norwegian jazz award. He married the author Vigdis Garbarek at twenty-one, and he is the father of the musician and composer Anja Garbarek.

The decisive apprenticeship of the 1960s was four years with the American composer and theorist George Russell, who was then living in Scandinavia and building bands from young local players. Garbarek is on Russell's large-scale Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature, performed at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter near Oslo in April 1969, and on the live Trip to Prillarguri, recorded in 1970. Russell also produced the album by Garbarek's own quartet with the guitarist Terje Rypdal, the bassist Arild Andersen and the drummer Jon Christensen, issued by Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman label as The Esoteric Circle. In 1969 Manfred Eicher invited him to join the new ECM label. Afric Pepperbird, recorded in Oslo in September 1970 and released the following year, was his first record for ECM, and it began a relationship with the label that has lasted more than half a century. The quartet followed it with Sart (1971), with the pianist Bobo Stenson added, and Garbarek then recorded Triptykon (recorded November 1972, released 1973) as a trio with Andersen and the Finnish drummer Edward Vesala. After meeting Stenson again at the 1973 Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw, he made Witchi-Tai-To (recorded November 1973, released 1974) with Stenson, Palle Danielsson and Christensen, a quartet record that critics rank among the best ECM released in the 1970s.

The same bassist and drummer became the rhythm section of Keith Jarrett's European Quartet, which made its debut with Belonging (recorded April 1974) and ran until 1979 with Garbarek as the only horn. Its studio albums are Belonging (1974) and My Song (recorded 1977); live recordings from 1979 include Nude Ants (Village Vanguard, released 1980), Personal Mountains (Tokyo, released 1989) and Sleeper (Tokyo, released 2012). He also appears as soloist on Jarrett's Luminessence (1974) and Arbour Zena (1975), which pair saxophone with string orchestra. Under his own name he turned inward. Dis (recorded December 1976, released 1977), with the guitarist Ralph Towner, a Norwegian brass sextet and the sound of a wind harp, is often cited as the start of his spacious, ambient approach; Places (1978) was a quartet date with the guitarist Bill Connors, the pianist John Taylor and Jack DeJohnette, and Photo with Blue Sky, White Cloud, Wires, Windows and a Red Roof (1979) was the official debut of the Jan Garbarek Group, a working band whose personnel has changed over the decades. Alongside it he joined a trio with Charlie Haden and the Brazilian guitarist Egberto Gismonti that made Mágico (1980) and Folk Songs (1981).

Through the 1980s he worked with a run of American guitarists on his own albums, John Abercrombie on Eventyr (1981), Bill Frisell on Paths, Prints (1982) and Wayfarer (1983), and David Torn on It's OK to Listen to the Gray Voice (1985), and he appeared on records by the violinist L. Shankar and the tabla player Zakir Hussain, whose Making Music (recorded 1986) also features John McLaughlin and the flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia. All Those Born with Wings (1987) was a solo album on which he plays all the instruments. In the 1990s I Took Up the Runes (1990) reworked Norwegian and Sámi material, StAR (1991) was a trio with the bassist Miroslav Vitouš and Peter Erskine, Ragas and Sagas (1992) paired him with the Pakistani singer Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, and Madar (recorded 1992, released 1994) joined him with the oud player Anouar Brahem and the tabla player Ustad Shaukat Hussain. Twelve Moons (1993) and Visible World (1996) were studio sets with larger casts of guest players, and the double album Rites (1998) gathered his own band, with the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra on one track.

His largest audience came from Officium, recorded in September 1993 at the monastery of Propstei St. Gerold in Austria and released in 1994 on ECM's New Series imprint. It sets Garbarek's soprano and tenor lines against the early-music vocal quartet the Hilliard Ensemble singing medieval and Renaissance sacred music, became one of the best-selling releases in ECM's history, and reached the pop charts in several European countries. Sequels followed with Mnemosyne (1999) and Officium Novum (2010), the latter built around Armenian music, and the collaboration ended with the ensemble's final concerts in 2014; a live recording from Bellinzona, Remember Me, My Dear, appeared in 2019. His other work since 2000 includes In Praise of Dreams (2004), nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album, Dresden (2009), his first live album with his own group, recorded in 2007, and an appearance with Pat Metheny and Gary Burton on Hommage à Eberhard Weber (2015). He is a Knight First Class of the Order of St. Olav (1999), received Norway's Gammleng Prize in 1982 and the Norwegian Arts Council's honorary award in 2004, was given the Willy Brandt Award in 2014, and is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. He is still active as of November 2026: the Jan Garbarek Group, with the pianist Rainer Brüninghaus, the bassist Yuri Daniel and the percussionist Trilok Gurtu, opened the Trondheim Jazz Festival with a sold-out concert at Olavshallen on May 5, 2026.

Garbarek's sound is among the most recognizable in modern saxophone playing: a sharp-edged, vibrato-light tone on tenor and soprano, long sustained notes that often sound like cries, and a deliberate use of silence. John Coltrane was his first model, and he absorbed the freer players around Coltrane, above all Albert Ayler, as well as the folk-minded approach of Don Cherry, who encouraged him to bring Norwegian melodies into his playing. George Russell, who gave him his first major platform, is reported to have called him the most original voice in European jazz since Django Reinhardt. After about 1973 he dropped the harsh dissonance of his early free-jazz records and kept the tone, building a music of folk-derived themes, slow harmonic motion and reverberant studio space rather than thematic improvisation in the manner of Sonny Rollins. The critics Richard Cook and Brian Morton likened its effect to sculpture, and the approach has divided listeners: admirers hear a distinctive Nordic lyricism, while detractors file the more meandering albums under new-age music. His later work took in synthesizers, South Asian and Middle Eastern players (Zakir Hussain, Trilok Gurtu, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, Anouar Brahem) and medieval and Armenian choral music with the Hilliard Ensemble, which is why his catalog is shelved variously under jazz, world music and classical crossover. The saxophonist Javier Girotto has said that the sound he chases is Garbarek's.