Grooving to Garner

Yesterday, I opened and listened to one of my new birthday CDs, Concert By The Sea by jazz pianist Erroll Garner.  Erroll is one of my favorites, and I knew I needed to have this classic album.

And yes, it deserves to be a classic.  Everything that’s great about Garner’s playing can be found here.  What really gets me is how he uses both hands and the things he does with them.  Sometimes he uses the left hand to embellish what he’s doing with the main melody.  It creates this echoing effect behind the individual notes.  Sometimes he will play two completely different things at the same time – even at different tempos and rhythms!  There is one part in the song “Mambo Carmel” where he plays the same notes on either hand, but in different keys.  The cumulative effect of all this is that Garner was really a one-man band.  I usually don’t pay much attention to what the bassist and drummer are doing when listening to Garner because there’s so much music coming out of that piano.

A few of these songs I have already heard, just different versions.  It’s interesting to hear the same song and notice how Garner makes it different each time.  A different approach, a heavier rhythm, more notes, fewer notes, faster, slower – he could play the same tune many different ways. 

I found a very interesting Wall Street Journal article about the history of the recording of Concert By The Sea, which you can read here.