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About Red Garland
Red Garland: Swingin’ on the Korner: Live at Keystone Korner
by C. Michael Bailey
Dismissed as a subpar cocktail pianist" when he joined Miles Davis' first great quintet in 1955 when Davis had returned from chemical exile, William Red" Garland would go on to define mainstream jazz piano on a series of recordings (as leader and sideman) taped between 1955 and 1962. Readily identifiable was his easy swing, supreme command of the blues and his liberal use of block chords that became a Garland trademark. The pianist would anchor a piano trio with bassist ...
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Red Garland Trio: Swingin' on the Korner
by Stefano Merighi
Il fiuto di Red Garland, a suo tempo, suggerì a Miles Davis di ingaggiare prima Philly Joe Jones e poi John Coltrane, per formare un simpatico quintetto. Solo per queste intuizioni Garland andrebbe posto su un piedistallo nel mondo del jazz. Ma William Red era anche un gran pianista, realizzatore di una sintesi mirabile tra l'eredità di un Count Basie, le innovazioni boppistiche di Bud Powell e la formalizzazione di quello stile mainstream che negli anni '50 influenzò legioni di ...
Continue ReadingRed Garland: The 1956 Trio
by Eric J. Iannelli
By the time pianist Red Garland recorded the amalgam of tracks on this essential disc, he'd been playing with the Miles Davis Quintet for about a year. Although he had performed alongside big names before, including Charlie Parker and Lester Young), The Quintet (as it would come to be known) was truly an all-star lineup: Garland, plus John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers. Garland--with a modest profile in 1955 that would more or less remain that way--reached a ...
Continue ReadingRed Garland: Red Garland's Piano
by Samuel Chell
Bass players owe Red Garland the biggest debt of all whereas piano players may be forgiven for blaming their left-handed awkwardness on the incalculable influence of the former boxer-turned-pianist. Because of Garland, pianists no longer voiced, for example, a C7 chord in root position (C-E-G-Bb) but made a habit of placing the third (E) or flatted seventh (Bb) on bottom, while assigning the bassist the chord's root.
Suddenly bassists were every pianist's best friend (or enemy, in the case of ...
Continue ReadingMiles Davis: The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions
by George Kanzler
The Miles Davis Quintet The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions Prestige Records 2006 (1955-56)
Miles (aka The New Miles Davis Quintet), Workin', Relaxin', Steamin' and Cookin' were the titles of the original Miles Davis Quintet LPs for Prestige that make up the first three (of four) CDs of this yet-again repackaging of what have become among the most familiar sides of Davis' recorded oeuvre. (The other studio album by this band was 'Round About Midnight ...
Continue ReadingMiles Davis: The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions
by Doug Collette
The Miles Davis Quintet The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions Prestige Records 2006 (1955-56)
Adorned by a painting rendered by the man with the horn himself, the elegant understatement of the packaging of The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions is wholly in line with the music it contains. The four-CD set--the latest chapter in the seemingly endless, but well justified, series of homages to Miles Davis--captures the entire output of Davis' mid ...
Continue ReadingThe Miles Davis Quintet: Miles Davis: The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions
by C. Michael Bailey
The noted Irish-American author Thomas Cahill has written a series of books called The Hinges of History" where, instead of concentrating on war, outrage, and catastrophe, the author illuminates stories of grace, great gift-givers and the evolution of our human sensibility. Cahill brings to life those personalities who had the greatest impact on who we are. In the realm of jazz music, we have an artist who regularly installed hinges in the history of American music. He ...
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