Periodically we receive articles and information from various sources for the Archives. We are pleased to present excerpts from an article by Mike Hennessey from an article he did for (UK music periodical) Crescendo. Mr. Hennessey is the former internation editor of Billboard, and the author of Klooke, the Biography of Kenny Clarke. Mr. Hennessey currently resides in Germany.

The Great Erroll Garner Legacy

By Mike Hennessey

George Wein regarded him as "a great musical genius".

Hugues Panassié said of him, "He is not only the greatest pianist to emerge in jazz since World War II, but he is also the only one who has created a new style which is in the true jazz tradition, one which constitutes the essence of this music."

Mary Lou Williams revered him as "an asset and inspiration to the jazz world."

Steve Allen said he was "the greatest popular pianist of our century."

And Art Tatum called him, "My little boy."

They were talking about Erroll Louis Garner, the formidably accomplished and incredibly prolific self-taught pianist who first began exploring the piano keyboard at the age of three and went on to become a genuine jazz legend. His professional career spanned almost four decades and, in that time, he recorded for dozens of different labels, sometimes solo, mostly with his own trio. His recorded output occupies 33 pages in Tom Lord's The Jazz Discography. He made altogether more than 200 albums.

Garner was an amazingly energetic and resourceful musician with a phenomenal ear, remarkable memory and an astonishing independence of right and left hands. He was completely ambidextrous and could write and play tennis right or left handed with equal facility. He was also a sensitive, intelligent and rather shy man with a sunny dispositiion and an impish humour and he never took himself or his art too seriously.

A Telarc six-CD set of recordings made by Erroll Garner between December 1959 and October 1973 -- simply entitled Erroll Garner -- offers an abundant and representative sample of the prodigious and incomparable Garner legacy. The set comprises 12 original albums, now available for the first time in digital CD format -- altogether a selection of 118 numbers, the vast majority of which come from the great American popular song repertoire.

For some unfathomable reason, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Garner's birthplace) and its environs have managed to produce some of jazz's most distinctive and individualistic pianists, starting in 1905 with Earl "Fatha" Hines and continuing with Mary Lou Williams (1910), Erroll Garner (1921), Dodo Marmarosa (1925), Ahmad Jamal (1930), Horace Parlan (1930), and Sonny Clark (1931).

Erroll Garner, whose father, a trumpet player, elder brother, Linton, a pianist, and three sisters were all musical, was a schoolmate of Dodo Marmarosa. When Garner was only ten years old, he became a member of the Kan-D-Kids, a group of young entertainers on KDKA Radio. At 16 he joined the band of local saxophonist Leroy Brown, with whom he stayed for four years. Afterwards he freelanced in the Pittsburgh area before moving to New York in 1944.

Early on, he was to create a piano style which was entirely and exclusively his own and, by the end of the 1940s, he had developed that trade-mark four-in-the-bar left hand, comping in the manner of a rhythm guitar and using accents like a drummer to "goose" the beat. Against the rhythmic/harmonic foundation of his left hand, he would use octaves or incisive, percussive single-note passages with his right hand, sometimes lagging as much as a semi-quaver behind the beat.

Another characteristic he developed was the florid, often bombastic, introduction which had no apparent relation to the tune which was to follow. He would build up a rousing rubato preamble and then, following the triple-forte climax, would bring down the decibels and surge dramatically into straight-ahead swinging tempo -- a most effective device.

He would also make use of four-bar riff figures, the equivalent of tutti passages in an orchestral score, to launch himself into a sparkling, irresistibly swinging solo. And he used contrapuntal inventions with right and left hand which demonstrated their astonishing independence. Another Garner characteristic was a Griffinesque fondness for introducing improbable quotes into his solos.

A major highlight for Garner in February 1947, when he was leading a trio in California with Red Callender and Doc West, was a recording session for Dial with Charlie Parker -- Bird's first record date after leaving the Camarillo Hospital. Garner later said that this was one of his finest musical experiences. One track from this session, "Cool Blues", was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque in France.

In March 1950 Erroll Garner made his concert début at the Music hall in Detroit -- one of the first jazz musicians to give such a recital. It was in the early 1950s that Erroll Garner's potential as a popular entertainer became apparent. Garner became a tremendous popular attraction whose appeal went far beyond the jazz community.

Together with his manager Martha Glaser, Garner founded his own label, Octave Records, in 1954 and, in 1956, he became the first jazz artist to be booked by classical impresario, Sol Hurok.

I first met Erroll Garner in Paris in 1965 and I will always treasure the answers he gave to two questions I put to him in the course of an interview.

Q: What happens if you start playing a number and then find you can't remember the middle eight?

A: I turn it into a medley.

Q: What happens if you hit a wrong note in the course of a solo?

A: I hit it a couple of times more.

Garner's distinctive and immediately recognisable keyboard style, with its potent dynamics and infectuous swing, has been widely immitated. As Brian Priestley has observed, "At an amateur level, more players attempted to imitate him than any other pianist in jazz history".

In that Paris interview, I asked Garner what he felt when he heard so many pseudo-Garners all over the world. He answered: "I love it. When they stop imitating me then I'll start wondering where I'm going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new. There's 88 keys there, boy, don't let anybody kid you, and they're all there to be played, not to be looked at!"

For Garner, a big band enthusiast who loved the music of Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Les Brown and Harry James, the piano was his orchestra and when he conducted it he was clearly enjoying himself hugely, accompanying his playing with his distinctive vocal backing of grunts, groans and giggles.

Only 5ft 2ins in height, Garner put the Manhattan telephone directory between himself and the piano stool so that he could really bear down on the keyboard.

One of his biggest hits was "Laura", recorded in September 1945, and his live Concert By The Sea album, recorded in September 1955, was one of the best selling jazz albums of all time.

Garner was also a gifted composer. In addition to "Misty", his most successful original, written in 1971, he also produced such appealing themes as "Erroll's Bounce", "Dreamy", "Nightwind", "That's My Kick", "Gaslight", "Mood Island", "The Loving Touch", "Paris Mist", "Dreamstreet", and "It Gets Better Every Time". All these Garner compositions are to be found in the Telarc set.

There's also Garner's memorable interpretations of standards like "A Fine Romance", "Three O'Clock In The Morning", "The Coffee Song", "Cheek To Cheek", "Lover Come Back To Me" and "Blue Lou". Though, for me, far and away the most exhilerating veresion of "Blue Lou" is that which Garner recorded at a Gene Norman "Just Jazz" concert in Pasadena in April 1947 with Wardell Gray, Irving Ashby, Red Callender and Jackie Mills. My favorite Garner recording of all time.

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