Michael Garrick - 1964 - Moonscape

Michael Garrick Trio

1964

Moonscape

01. Moonscape

02. Music For Shattering Supermarkets

03. Sketches Of Israel

04. A Face In The Crowd

05. Man, Have You Ever Heard

06. Take-Off

Bass – Dave Green

Bass – John Taylor (track 1)

Drums – Colin Barnes

Piano – Michael Garrick

Original release limited to 99 copies apparently for tax reasons.

Often capricious, frequently didactic, yet invariably passionate about his music, the jazz pianist and composer Mike Garrick, who has died aged 78 following a heart operation, was at the forefront of British modern jazz from the 1960s to the present. Creatively restless, Garrick allied himself to jazz innovators such as the Jamaican altoist Joe Harriott and to poets with a penchant for jazz, while also building a considerable repertoire of extended orchestral pieces and acting as a tireless proselytiser for jazz in schools. All this, while leading his own small groups and a much-lauded big band.

"It's like a tonic to be in front of a [big] band," he said in 2005. "One feels so grateful for the thing actually happening, knowing that musicians have come because they want to be there." Although The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings described Garrick as "a national treasure", wider recognition eluded him until 2010 when, somewhat belatedly in the view of many, he was appointed MBE.

Garrick's impressive compositional range extended to major choral works and liturgical pieces as well as more conventional big-band scores; his A Zodiac of Angels, a 70-minute work, performed in 1988, combined jazz soloists, a symphony orchestra and chorus, and choreography. It is somehow typical of the man that he was working on a new composition and planning for upcoming concerts while in hospital awaiting surgery.

Garrick was born in Enfield, north London, and became enthused about jazz after hearing boogie-woogie on wartime radio broadcasts. He was largely self-taught, opting after national service to read English literature at University College London, and graduating in 1959. Having already started his first groups while at UCL, he retained an abiding love for England's literature and countryside, often infusing his onstage discourses and his compositions with literary references.

His note for Green and Pleasant Land, a jazz string quartet piece commissioned by the Little Missenden festival in 2002, stated: "My love of England is embodied in Shakespeare, Delius, Keats, Britten and the breathtaking landscapes that still form the greater part of 'this sceptr'd isle'." This perhaps explains why the jazz musician and writer Ken Rattenbury described him as "the JMW Turner of jazz composition". The jazz writer Steve Voce said: "It's not pretentious to describe him as the British Duke Ellington."

Committed to modern jazz, Garrick took a shine to the radical stance evinced by Harriott and also to poetry, helping in 1961 to kickstart Poetry and Jazz in Concert as its music director, improvising at the piano with Harriott and the trumpeter Shake Keane, as Jeremy Robson, Laurie Lee, Adrian Mitchell, Vernon Scannell, Spike Milligan or John Smith declaimed their poems. He was also a key member of the much-heralded Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet, working steadily with this band from 1965 to 1969, their many recordings (lately reissued) notable for Garrick's own quirkily inventive piano and his many compositions, among them Black Marigolds (1966) and Dusk Fire (1965, this title later adopted for his 2010 autobiography).

Always the free-thinker, Garrick formed a sextet in 1966 and used Norma Winstone's voice as a frontline instrument, in harmony with the trumpeter Henry Lowther and saxophonist Art Themen. The vocally adventurous Winstone became an enduring associate, continuing to appear and record with Garrick. This was also the period when he began to compose on a grander scale, starting with his Jazz Praises, a series of religious pieces for his sextet and a large choir, first performed and recorded in St Paul's Cathedral in 1968, with Garrick playing the organ.

Culturally voracious, Garrick, who read widely, became interested in Indian classical music, employing Indian scales and techniques in a number of his compositions. He also channelled his passion for jazz into education, taking his Travelling Jazz Faculty and sextet into schools up and down Britain, running residential summer courses for aspiring players under the auspices of the Guildhall School and his own Jazz Academy, and teaching at the Royal Academy and Trinity College. In 1970, he attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston as a mature student, gaining an open fellowship.

Garrick's polymathic nature and desire to communicate his enthusiasm sometimes led to difficulties; excessively prolix in his bandstand announcements, he could often exasperate, this sometimes obscuring his true worth as a performer. Inspired in part by Ellington and Bill Evans, Garrick never took the easy path; at his best, as shown on releases on his Jazz Academy label, he was a brilliantly intuitive small-group pianist, always sounding like nobody but himself.

More recently, Garrick had continued to compose and to perform regularly in clubs and churches with his big band and small groups. Excited to have met up with the young singer Nette Robinson, he revelled in her pitch-perfect intonation as she interpreted his demanding compositions. Their Lyric Trio (completed by the virtuoso saxophonist Tony Woods) and Garrick's new quartet tribute to the Modern Jazz Quartet had seemed set fair to run and run.

Michael Garrick, jazz pianist, organist, bandleader and composer, born 30 May 1933; died 11 November 2011

Originally privately pressed in 1964 in an edition of just 99 copies, Moonscape is possibly the most rare, most desirable and certainly most valuable modern British jazz record ever made. One of the super-scarce 10" originals could cost you $4000 in mint condition. This is the first time Moonscape has had a proper release, and the first time it has been available on CD. Recorded in London in 1964, Moonscape is pianist and modern British jazz legend Michael Garrick's first album. Until now, and for 99 obvious reasons, very few people have ever heard this stunning lunar jazz. As interest in modern British jazz and Michael Garrick has increased over the last decade, this recording has gained almost mythical status, with possibly only two copies coming to market in that time. Moonscape is a solid keystone in the development of Britain's jazz sound, with a slightly floaty, drifting essence to the music, and an early British first foray into "The New Thing" -- the free jazz sound, even though the steps here are tentative and a touch naive. Highlights on such a short album are frequent, and current Trunk favorites include the awesome and blissfully sad "Sketches Of Israel," and the complex 6/8 trip "Man Have You Ever Heard." This is British modern jazz at its very best. Even though the space race had not really begun by 1964, and man was still a full five years away from a moonwalk, Garrick was no doubt onto something here, his prescient view of sound, jazz and space predating the rush of international cosmic jazz that punctuated the late 1960s and early 1970s. So, welcome at last to Moonscape, and thank heavens there are more than 99 copies this time around.

Moonscape is the first trio offering by famed British pianist, organist, and composer Michael Garrick. Garrick, who has since worked with everyone from Joe Harriott to Neil Ardley to Ian Carr to Don Rendell, is also a man of letters and has conducted and participated in more than 2,300 concerts of jazz and poetry. This set is the true Holy Grail of modern British jazz, and thanks to famed collector and blogger Jonny Trunk of Trunk Records, is available (on both CD and vinyl) widely for the first time since it was released in an edition of 99 copies on 10" 33-rpm vinyl in 1964. This is not some flawed early attempt at being the leader of a trio -- Garrick was already one. Instead, it is a remarkable, diverse collection of six tunes (all original compositions) that pointed the way for the era of British jazzmen to come. One can hear in this set the beautifully experimental (yet playful and accessible) rhythmic pointillism that Paul Bley was messing about with around the same time in "A Face in the Crowd" (with some arco playing by bassist David Green), initially composed to accompany a poem by Jeremy Robson. The opening title track is a whispering inquiry into minor keys and the use of space. Colin Barnes' drumming is used not so much to keep a beat but to create spaces between phrases -- some of which are dissonant but not angular. But that's just the intro. What emerges is a scalar set of contingencies around three or four different shapes by Garrick. This is early vanguard Brit jazz but it swings, too. And speaking of swing, these cats got to show what they were about in the blistering bop of "Music for Shattering Supermarkets." Easily the most lyrical track here is the ballad "Sketches of Israel." It commences with a subtle shimmering theme and chord pattern that increases and decreases dynamically, with some startling punched-up crescendo work and a fine bass solo by Green. The hard bop of "Man, Have You Heard" is rooted deeply in early English folk music and the blues with a set of harmonics worthy of Brubeck's best work. And this one, too, swings like mad. Finally, "Take-Off" returns to the notion of explorations of texture, tension, and space. Just under three minutes in length, it walks the line of free jazz without ever stepping quite onto it. Rhythmically organized around three seemingly simple chord patterns, the rhythm section offers real force, which Garrick engages by breaking his figures down and alternating them while building them again. This is an extraordinary and visionary piece of work that deserves its status, with only one complaint: the playing format of the 10" LP only afforded less than half an hour's playing time. This little slab comes in at 22 and a half minutes, which leaves the listener who encounters this for the first time breathless and wanting more. It also stands up to repeated spins as an essential piece of work. Great thanks to Garrick and Trunk.