45th anniversary of Erroll Garner's landmark recording Concert By The Sea

September 19th will mark the 45th anniversary of the landmark Erroll Garner recording Concert By The Sea.

On a sunny day in September of 1955, Garner and his accompanists Denzil Best and Eddie Calhoun, and manager Martha Glaser, motored down from San Francisco to Carmel, where Garner appeared in a concert that night. The conditions were idea, the mood wonderful, and Garner "was in championship form... Performing with a sense of building which few musicians can match, he played an improvised program that was impeccably paced, stimulatingly developed and blazing with enthusiasm... The audience was completely responsive to every nuance of Garner's performance."

The concert was serendipitously recorded by a serviceman from Fort Ord, and secured by Martha Glaser who brought the tapes to New York, where Columbia Records released them. "Several generations of listeners have cut their eye teeth on jazz, by way of introduction, with Erroll Garner's Concert By The Sea... In the years since its release, Concert By The Sea has become a legendary recording, a milestone in recorded concerts..." Broadcaster Ed Bradley has termed it his Rosetta Stone of jazz.

Garner's concert career, which began in 1950 in Detroit at the Music Hall, flourished until his untimely death in 1977. Concert By The Sea continues as one of the high marks of his legacy.

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