THE JAZZ LIFE

Gilles Peterson, interviewed recently, feels that the British jazz artists he champions from the 1960s did "live the jazz life… They presented a belief in the movement." Garrick for one has never lost sight of his own musical fantasy, and if others of his generation flirted with, or were even hijacked by, the strains of rock and electronic gadgetry (and some, it has to be said, danced to this tune with clogs rather than Astaire's dandy footwork), he remains until this day as active and as consumed with his music as ever, and his adventurous brief to expand its social and artistic gamut remains strong. He claims that he has never been "driven, that's too harsh a term; obliged, I would say." There is realism, too: "as you get older you realise there is no retreat, you're stuck with it." When incapacitated with severe back problems in 1980 (Norma Winstone, Ronnie Scott and others helped him financially with a benefit concert at the 100 Club) or when the tank has run empty, the times when he feels that "actually what you're doing is insignificant and who's going to bother with it anyway," he has ridden through his periods of despair. In reality, of course, the jazz life, romanticized and embroidered, is "almost drudgery, and the reason you keep on doing it is because when you actually achieve what you want … playing with other people or, in my case as a writer, hearing other people playing your music, well then the 'up' for that is so positive: that's what enables you to carry on."

A BROAD CANVAS

Garrick has always sought to broaden the appeal of jazz and give it a wider social currency, and his peripatetic jazz life has been punctuated by opportunities to paint on a larger canvas and mix his musical palette. His Jazz Praises projects from the 1960s, which actually predate Ellington's sacred concerts, first gave him the chance to use choral voicing in a jazz environment and found its creator in the organ loft of St Paul's in 1968, a concert caught successfully on disc. In 1961, with Joe Harriott and Shake Keane augmenting his trio, he became musical director of Jeremy Robson's Poetry And Jazz In Concert, a roadshow that involved setting music to poems written and recited by, among others, Laurie Lee, Spike Milligan, Dannie Abse, Vernon Scannell and Adrian Mitchell. An unlikely affinity was forged with one scribe, John Smith, who wrote a set of poems for the quintet called Jazz For Five. A succession of collaboratory projects followed in its wake including the cantata commissioned by the Farnham Festival, Mr Smith's Apocalypse. Other large-scale pieces, involving strings or full orchestra and chorus, have also been commissioned along the way, and many of his ideas, such as Bovingdon Poppies (1993) or Linda (commissioned this year by the Farnham Festival), have been on his mind for many years before the opportunity to compose them presented itself.

It is both the sheer weight of Garrick's output and its breadth which astonishes most: he is, without question, Britain's answer to Ellington, and only Mike Westbrook can begin to compare. His big band, formed in 1985, fits in to the narrative of his development and is the obvious outcome of the work he was writing in the early-1970s for his sextet/septet - with Art Themen, Henry Lowther, Don Rendell and Norma Winstone (whose voice Garrick used instrumentally to wonderful effect, a device never taken up elsewhere so comprehensively) - where multi-textured instrumental sound is created. The arrangements are deft and accomplished, the music never rests on its laurels but constantly challenges the listener with interweaving lines and contrasting textures. It is this sense of contrast, of light and shade, as though there are contradictory forces at its heart, that is the kernel of his music. Improvisation challenges composition and form, and surprise challenges accepted practice (how many reviewers of his recorded work do we see recoil partly from this?), almost as though he is wrecking his ship on otherwise calm waters.

COMPOSITION

Much of Garrick's music is inspired by the written word, poetry often its seedling. "A poem has everything - structure, feelings and a clear focus of what everything is about... All you have to do is hang the music on it." His music tends to be thematic, it tells a story, and not often are his compositions merely academic exercises; some though are written for fun, like the recent Count 77, a sensational eleven-bar Caribbean jaunt in 7/4 time. (As an aside, his performance of such pieces offers a freedom and lucidity that Brubeck, for instance, rarely touched in his forays into irregular time.)

He studied at Berklee College in the United States for two periods in the mid-1970s when Mike Gibbs was composer in residence. He crammed his timetable with all that was on offer - orchestral writing, arranging, the use of synthesisers, even a study of Schoenberg. Much of what he learnt confirmed and shaped much of his own knowledge gained through experience. His inquisitiveness is practical rather than academic, and he would contend that jazz musicians should know of theory by intuition if not by name, citing as a prime example the late altoist Bruce Turner who knew neither notation nor chord symbols.

He made a study of Indian music in the 1960s before the Beatles made India an attachment to their lifestyle, and much of the Rendell/Carr Quintet's repertoire is inspired by Indian ragas; Black Marigolds, perhaps his best-known piece, is a "self-conscious parody." He learnt Parker's solos by rote, not such an uncommon feat for a jazz musician, but his absorption of twentieth-century classical compositional theory, if idiosyncratic and erratic, is. Not too many jazz musicians are familiar with Messiaen's six modes of limited transposition, Scriabin's 'Prometheus' chord or Nicholas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (a book he refers to only, I suspect, to tell the story of its author's party-piece, which was to play the right hand of Chopin's Black Keys study with an orange!).

Garrick's music sits awkwardly in today's jazz world. If it is not complex neither is it straightforward, and in some respects he stands aside from the mainstream and his music has been perceived as an acquired taste, perhaps the fate of all individualists. But neither the mystique nor cliquish respect that 'difficult' music bestows upon some sits at all easy with him, and he believes that face-to-face he can "disarm an audience." It can only be ironic that for decades he has travelled the country playing and teaching jazz in school classrooms! He is aware that in some quarters of the jazz press there has been a reaction to his musical quirks, and also that music which demands attention from the listener, even if it swings, induces an element of fear. Of his own musical idiosynracies Garrick is unapologetic; and of his use of so many tricks of his trade, his seemingly endless desire to surprise with irregular time patterns and unique forms and structure - which at times has perplexed critics of his music - he says that it seems "to need to be done, there is no other justification, and I'm by no means at all 'fed up' with the old jazz tradition." He has never resorted to 'repertoire jazz', and the arrangements he makes for his big band of, say, the Ellington classics are novel interpretations and never mere reworkings.

TEACHER

Mindful of his own troubled route to jazz, Garrick has always devoted time and energy to sowing its seed, both in schools, with his Travelling Jazz Faculty formed in 1965 to entertain and teach children the fundamentals of his music in their classroom, and at college level, having held teaching posts at the Royal Academy of Music, the Guildhall and Trinity College of Music. In 1975 he instigated a jazz course for the Wavendon All Music Plan at John Dankworth's request; he was one of the prime movers in the establishment of the Associated Board's jazz examinations in 1999; and for over a decade he has organized two weeks of tuition each year at his own Jazz Academy based at the Beechwood Campus in Tunbridge Wells. It has "become an integral part" of his professional life, he says, and there can be few jazz musicians who have spent more time developing young talent than Garrick. To this end his crowning achievement, of course, may be his big band.

PIANIST

As pianist Garrick has matured with age: "gradually you develop more confidence in your own impulses," he says. The hustle of youth has dimmed and his playing is now more rounded than ever, takes on a full eight-octave compass, and makes the listener aware of a voice that has thought through its stylistic position and is confident with it. Nevertheless, he remains in awe of others, not just the "huge looming figures from the past" who include the two-fingered Lionel Hampton and George Shearing, but also of his contemporaries: Bill Evans, "who blew me away," Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and, to a lesser extent, Keith Jarrett. He cites fellow-Brit John Taylor as a pianist for whom he has total respect: "his originality and accomplishment are at least on a par with what was coming through people like Corea," states Garrick, who himself has tried to adapt to the "John Taylor vein of thinking." And yet the striking feature of Garrick's playing is that he sounds like nobody else, he only sounds like himself; the angularity of Stan Tracey's post-bebop lines occasionally surface, but the edges are softened by the respect Garrick displays for his piano and the attention he gives to dynamics, a delightful touch, and pedalling. His near total abstinence from well worn or clichéd phrases, used by so many pianists as a crutch or as a resting point along the way, is immediately apparent. There are no effusive runs à la Peterson, and he works to ensure that "finger patterns," the detritus of the jazz pianist's mechanistic mind, do not come too close to the surface: when inclined he plays Mozart, for the love of it, and so that his hands are doing things "that aren't in your repertoire of shapes." Technique is a "kind of mirage," he says, but then Garrick possesses the imagination, as did his hero Bill Evans, never to fall back on it. A constituent part of his style is his ambidextrous armoury: both left and right hand can play equal measure in his stylistic cloak. His left hand can roam mercilessly free, can complement, accent, interpose and even argue with the flow of improvisation when called upon. This is a point worth making if only because many jazz pianists, including some of the finest, have never been able to involve effectively both hands in the improvisatory process, either through inclination, through habit, or because it has never been required of them from the context within which they play. Garrick is not frightened of silence and has built in to his style the need for it and the confidence to use it - and plenty of it. Jazz piano he likens to speech: the aim is to exclude all the stammers and nervous interjections, the slang and its hesitancies. But speech is part of conversation, and Garrick rarely asks his musical partners to provide only a harmonic or rhythmic cushion. To listen to him now in a trio setting [A Lady In Waiting - JAZA 1], not historically his natural habitat, is a real treat, for it is rich ensemble improvisation through and through.

HOMILY

Michael Garrick has been at the forefront of British jazz for over forty years. He is a pianist of manifest qualities, an improvising musician of wit and invention, and has led or been part of some of the most staple bands of this period. These are accolades rare enough. But his reinvention of the jazz experience in English terms and his width and achievement in composition are without parallel in British jazz of this or any other period. Had he been born in a different period or in a different place he would have been championed further. As it is, he is not even merited a footnote in the recent A New History Of Jazz by Alyn Shipton, yet his achievements have played a part in the developing narrative of the music, and within the context of our own British shores are significant.

Garrick's quest has been for first principles: "it's touchingly ironic," he writes, "that the 'new' harmonic sounds [in modern jazz] so assiduously sought for devolve to a handful of already-existent scales." He found Rudolf Steiner's Apocalypse of St John in a bookshop many years ago; always deeply interested in faith and creation myth, he found in it a "sphere of knowledge that all hangs together." He wonders at Steiner's theories of Projective Geometry ("why didn't we do this at school, it's beautiful stuff?"), which invoke for Garrick a sort of magic: "from straight lines we make curves," he marvels. This also is the challenge he has set for his music. Good humoured, all-embracing, exhibiting curiosity and posing conundrum, Garrick's music, to borrow from Churchill, is a riddle wrapped in mystery inside a simple scale. We, too, marvel at the magic it invokes.

© DENNIS HARRISONMarch 2003

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photo credits : SISI BURN - tel 0208 332 7958
all photographs are the copyright of Sisi Burn
photographer specialising in classical and jazz musicians
- commissions undertaken
in rehearsal, performance and portraits
- many stock pictures also available on request

[Michael Garrick - from www.britishacademy.com
Garrick at Darlington Arts Centre, 1999 - from www.jazzaction.co.uk]

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WEB LINKS: Garrick's own Jazz Academy: www.jazzacademy.co.uk www.myspace.com/michaelgarrick A site devoted to Ian Carr, with interesting links: http://www.geocities.com/icnucleus/

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