Record of the Day: Erroll Garner, “The Greatest Garner”

Erroll Garner
“The Greatest Garner” (Atlantic Jazz CD 8122-73713-2)

All jazz enthusiasts know the ultra-virtuosity style of pianist Erroll Garner, who through instinctive skill poured torrents of notes and mountains of parallel chords onto the keyboard with astonishing technical skill (although not always
supported by equally good taste).
Enthralling, histrionic, excessive, Garner’s pianism possessed an overwhelming swing capable of communicating even with a very large audience, perhaps unaccustomed to jazz refinements but instantly captured by Garner’s ability as an authentic necromancer.

These engravings, however, present us with a very different side of his artistic personality. Made between 1949 and 1950 for the
Atlantic see the pianist together with two different trio formations and predate the colossal sales success that awaited him five years later with the famous album “Concert by the Sea”.
Garner was still a little-known name when he made these recordings in which he moves with surprising delicacy favoring moderate tempos and exploring the range of the instrument with remarkable dynamic subtlety; I don’t know if these recordings can be considered his best (as the album title seems to suggest) but they are certainly among the most interesting and surprising. Naturally there is no lack of technical virtuosity but we are far from the almost circus-like performances of the following years.

Very careful to get in tune with the other musicians (including Leonard Gaskin on bass and Charlie Smith on drums), Garner strings together one song after another almost nonchalantly, alternating well-known standards with his own, decidedly successful compositions. The influence of pianists such as Hines and Tatum is clearly perceptible in the harmonic language used by Garner, but the way of fragmenting the thematic fragments of the pieces in a rhapsodic manner is already entirely his own work, as is the arrangement of the chordal voicings and the taste for the pungent harmonies often connected in unpredictable ways.

Famous pieces (“The Way You Look Tonight”, “Summertime”, “Flamingo”, “Skylark”) and classics such as Ravel’s Pavane and Debussy’s “Claire De Lune” benefit from the polishing to which Garner subjects them using continuous agogic variations and rhythms born from his apparently inexhaustible piano imagination.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical topics.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: A record for every day of the year” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.