Erroll Garner: Campus Concert

In the history of recorded music, whether it be cave holler, rock, rap, jazz, country or take your pick, there are not a lot of albums that hold one's attention and imagination like the epic Concert By The Sea (Legacy, 2015). But somehow Erroll Garner's other live albums such as this one, the last released in his all too brief lifetime (Garner passed of cardiac arrest, aged 52), or the recently discovered, Nightconcert (Mack Avenue, 2018), in some inexplicable way, always come close. Stop and think about that for a minute.

It is not that Campus Concert (or the earlier One World, also part of the year-long Octave Remastered Series of Garner releases courtesy of Mack Avenue) bears all the historical provenance of the mythical Concert By The Sea but that its performance is so equally inspired, so right now as it was back in 1962, that it becomes astounding to consider Garner's infinite consistency and his vast knowledge of the music and, as importantly, of his audience.

Recorded at Indian's Purdue University and the World's Fair Playhouse in Seattle, Garner and company—drummer Kelly Martin and Garner's ever-present, ever-ready bassist Eddie Calhoun—just crank up and go. "Almost Like Being In Love," "Lulu's Back In Town," "Stardust," a previously unreleased, rarely recorded original "La Petite Mambo," and a pole-vaulting "In The Still Of The Night" simply leave you feeling as if you have just heard genius. And you have.