Jazz Articles about Erroll Garner

Erroll Garner: Night Concert

by Chris Mosey
July 12, 2018

It's the jazz equivalent of finding a Van Gogh or a Ming vase in the attic: the discovery of a complete 1964 perfectly recorded concert by one of the music's greatest virtuoso solo pianists. In the beginning was Art Tatum. Then came Oscar Peterson. Finally--and in many ways the most interesting of the holy trinity--was Erroll Garner. Garner was flashy, famed for his long, rambling introductions. In a section of the liner notes jazz historian Professor Robin ...

Erroll Garner: Ready Take One

by Dan McClenaghan
February 13, 2017

Erroll Garner (1923-1977) played the piano like all was well with the world, with a flashy and elegant panache. And sometimes that's just what we need. With a swinging style that bubbled up from the stride and ragtime traditions, and nudged into the bop arena, Garner's was an ebullient sound--virtuosic and embellished with ornamental phrasings and splashes of sparkling colors. So, discovery of new Garner music, of the highest quality, is reason to celebrate. Ready Take ...

Erroll Garner: Erroll Garner: The Complete Concert By the Sea

by David Rickert
November 17, 2015

Erroll Garner's Concert by the Sea was a huge hit when it was released in 1956 and became one of the few jazz records that everyone seemed to own. One listen is all it takes to understand the wide appeal of this live date from the Sunset Center in Carmel, California. Garner, the happiest and most extroverted of pianists, works through a program of well-known standards with technical brilliance and dazzling wit in a tour-de-force of stride, boogie-woogie, ragtime, and ...

Erroll Garner: Early In Paris

by Warren Allen
January 21, 2010

Erroll Garner was one of the savants of jazz who helped define the sound and style of his instrument without ever learning to read music. His brilliance rested in a unique ear, from which he developed a personal and indisputably beautiful approach to the piano that spun beautiful, romantic statements and spontaneous adventures from his own tunes and the songs of the American Songbook. It is telling, that in a modern jazz world dominated by virtuosi, Garner remains as unduplicated ...

Erroll Garner: 1953

by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
March 26, 2006

Listening to an Erroll Garner record is, for me, a little like the first time I drank mezcal, a distilled liquor made from the agave plant--with a worm in the bottle--in Oaxaca, Mexico. An initial sharp and soaring euphoria, unique among the alcoholic beverages, immediately followed by an equally sharp, crushing headache accompanied by nausea. The whole vertiginous process of substance abuse telescoped into a very few minutes' time.

So it is with most of the tracks on 1953, a ...

Erroll Garner: Concert By The Sea

by C. Michael Bailey
August 9, 2005

Erroll Garner Concert By The Sea Columbia 40589 1955

In the same way that the former St. Louis Cardinal/Atlanta Brave Terry Pendleton demonstrated that a fat man could play most-valuable-player in baseball, Erroll Garner showed that one did not have to be able to read a note of music to be influential as a jazz musician. Born in Pittsburgh, Garner moved to New York City and worked with Slam Stewart's Trio during the early ...

The Erroll Garner Trio: The Greatest Garner

by Chris M. Slawecki
May 19, 2004

Erroll Garner imperturbably played more or less the same piano style throughout his career, blending jazz and pop with a bounce and grin. When he rocks a tempo hard, as on this version of “Confessin,’” he nearly sounds the second coming of Fats Waller, completely free from the bebop influence felt by many of Garner’s piano contemporaries.

These 1949–50 sessions coincided with Garner’s engagements at such famous Harlem showplaces as the Three Deuces, the Apollo Theatre, and ...