Articles By Alex Levin
Erroll Garner’s Centennial: Appreciating His Unpredictability and Innate Improvisational Spirit
Some jazz pianists are so stylistically coherent that the mere mention of their names evokes their sound in our imagination. It’s a rare achievement to play so individualistically that your name evokes your sound, your touch, the joy and sparkle of your playing. Erroll Garner is the rarest of birds: a true, innate, ceaselessly ‘deelightful’ genius of music. Perhaps this is what Clark Terry meant when he said of Garner, “The man was complete. He could do it all.” The smile on my face as I sit here writing this and listening to Garner’s catalog of recordings attests to the ways in which he did, in fact, “do it all,” and what a joy and an honor it is to listen and learn from this giant of jazz.
published on 06/02/2021
