Hopkins had wanted to find out more about jazz, and wanted to get into composing for film, so came to Garson – who, in turn, loved Hopkins’ style of pop playing, on great songs like ‘Angie’ by the Rolling Stones, for example. He says he could never have played perfect pop like Hopkins himself as that was not him, but he ended up that day doing ‘second-rate Nicky’ under such duress, and they were happy with it. Sadly, Garson never got the chance to tell Nicky Hopkins this story, as Hopkins died soon after, in 1994.22
Garson recalls a week around the same time rehearsing in Tunbridge Wells with Jeff Beck for some concerts with Stanley Clarke at which Beck guested, at the North Sea Jazz Festival. There is footage viewable online of this, in which Garson can be seen lending his support on keyboards, in a very different genre once again from either the 1972-74 work with Bowie or his jazz trio work. This was real jazz fusion, and although he says that in retrospect it is not for him the most strongly felt style, being more about technical performance than soul or passion, nevertheless you can see and hear that he was accessing his own reserves of creativity. Beck had also made a guest appearance and traded solos with Ronson on the last Ziggy Stardust show at Hammersmith, playing on ‘The Jean Genie’/’Love Me Do’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Around and Around’, so this was not the first time Garson had played with him.
This adaptability is needed for the many sessions he performs now, often organised at long distance. Whilst I am there, he receives a request from a rock band to play (yet again) ‘some Aladdin Sane style piano’ on one of their tracks. His description of part of this process gives an insight into his working methods and attention to detail.
I put on their track, set up the computer and I push RECORD – this was about three hours ago – first take. I saw their chord chart but it was wrongly written out so I ignored it and played by ear. Now, tonight or tomorrow, after editing, cleaning it up, making sure the time is lined – because I just went ‘off the cuff’, so I got it in one take, but it means now it needs refinement – then the re-recording of it. I recorded it on a sample piano. Now, I will record on a real piano. I have the MIDI data so the piano will play itself. I have a whole process to get it to sound right.
Garson’s recording studio, which adjoins his home in California, has a slight natural reverb due to its hard surfaces and high ceiling. He uses a Disklavier player-piano for playback, whereby he can watch what he has played and recorded as if it were physically being played again, as the Disklavier keys actually move up and down to perform the playback. The special beauty of this set-up is that once he is happy with the MIDI recording which he has worked on digitally, the final recording is made using a nine-foot grand piano which is a ‘real’ piano as well as a Disklavier, so that the final audio sound file boasts the unique resonance of real hammers hitting real strings.
He estimates that he has recorded parts in this way for over two hundred artists over the past five years, including many who are already dedicated fans of the work he did with Bowie or with others, and often openly request something which is in the style or spirit of particular tracks which he has played on in the past. He does, however, always make a point of trying to give these clients something new of himself, rather than simply to regenerate the stylings or solos of earlier years. He often seems to understand better than they do what they really want. They may not always see this until the work is done, but he has found that by being himself and trusting his own instincts in interpreting their instructions, they are rarely disappointed.
The most important element of Garson’s approach to his music – and even to life – is not to ‘get in your own way’. For him, it is all about flow. As soon as he is thinking about the process he is in, then although he will still very likely deliver a great performance or one which is more than competent, nevertheless his heart would not have been in it and he would not be producing his best work. What we aspire to as creative artists is to avoid that self-consciousness, that introspection which becomes an obstacle to true creativity. This is a paradox, because we also benefit in life in general from an awareness of ourselves and the situation we are in. Perhaps the moment of creativity and inspiration is the moment in which that otherwise healthy self-awareness takes a step back. This letting go of ego, whilst remaining present and aware, is key to Garson’s outlook; one of his compositions is called ‘Getting Out of Your Own Way’.
A sometimes vacant expression whilst playing can be a reflection of just such a moment, of getting ‘lost in the music’. Everyone has experienced this phenomenon in their daily lives. When you are engaged in something which totally absorbs you, time passes in an instant, because the activity takes you over. What was work or obligation then comes to transcend the petty transactions of time, commerce or duty. By apparently disengaging the brain, or at least the cognitive part, ‘looking out of the window’, fully relaxing and yet continuing to perform, it is amazing how much musical memory can be accessed, even of songs which you did not think you knew at all. It is as if by relaxing, by disengaging that part of the brain which actually tries to recall details, that this information floats back into use naturally. For Garson, this disengagement from active thinking is a spiritual matter, and of great importance to him as a musician.
What is the nature of that additional element in emotional musical expression which lies beyond rhythm, melody and harmony? By using subtle mathematical combinations of sounds, with their myriad permutations of pitch, timbre, duration, tempo and beat, we generate an emotional meaning, a feeling which is greater than the sum of these parts. Garson believes that one of the first steps toward learning to play at a higher level is to have the humility to ‘unlearn’ and ‘unknow’ everything which is getting in the way of that true inspiration. This is the point at which a deeper learning begins.
If we think of music as simply another form of communication with its own linguistic tools, we can acknowledge that, just as it would be misguided and offensive to suggest that someone with a limited vocabulary or one different from our own might therefore have nothing of value to say to us, so in the same way it is foolish for musical snobs of any genre to discount the creativity of those who use a different idiom or linguistic code. Some musicians may lack certain techniques and yet their ‘intention’, their purpose, heart and passion is just as valid.
Garson grew up in the 1950s, when it was respected to be a virtuoso, and his determination made him one too. It was the tail-end of the period of classical piano virtuosos which had peaked around the early-to-mid twentieth century, with masters of the keyboard like Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989), Josef Hofmann (1876-1957) or Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982), all of whom, as Garson says in his Brooklyn vernacular (a highly expressive linguistic code), with their dazzling skills, ‘just tore up the piano!’
Today it is possible to bypass much of the special skill previously required even to create and present original music. Change in recent years has been more and more rapid in this direction. The cost of a professional standard recording set-up (even the need for a studio has been reduced, hence the arrival of this term) has been slashed again and again in recent years, thanks to rapidly advancing technology. Now, for a few thousand pounds or dollars, or even a few hundred, people can make and record music at home to a standard which, whilst not by any means as exacting as would be achieved in a fully financed industry project, nevertheless is presentable. This is having a huge effect on people’s relationship with the creative process, as well as their understanding of music as a whole.
That tradition of cultivating pianistic virtuosity, typified by Horowitz or Rubinstein in the mid twentieth century, is in decline now, at least in the West. Garson observes that:
It has been picked up by many Asian pianists, there’s a lot of phenomenal machine-like pianists these days, though only a very small percentage have the magic. They adopted the overview of Western music ; they missed some of the essence, but there’s amazing discipline, and now some are actually getting the feel too.23
> But moments of true inspiration within musical performance are precious and rare. In any hour of live music, in any collection of songs on a recording, what percentage really will leave a person with that spine-tingling reaction of wonder? In one of his jazz concerts lasting two hours, Garson estimates that on most occasions it is only about fifteen minutes at most which reach that memorable peak. He recalls when he was seventeen years old having heard Rubinstein play the Waldstein Sonata and been so affected by it that he could not stop speaking about it. Yet even then it was the Third Movement which grabbed him; he barely remembered the rest of the programme. In that Third Movement something special happened for him, even with Rubinstein’s tiny slips or blemishes, which Garson noticed and enjoyed because this was part of its special expression. Years later Rubinstein’s son heard Garson play and said, ‘You know, you play really well. You remind me a little bit of my Dad,’ which was the ultimate accolade for Garson, who says he was ‘struck dead’.
Garson recommends Rubinstein’s two-volume memoirs,24 mentioning that Rubinstein was a bit of a playboy in his early years, ‘so he really wasn’t taking care of business’. In corroboration of this, Rubinstein has been quoted as saying (pre-dating top footballer George Best’s famous statement many years later that ‘I spent ninety per cent of my money on women and drink. The rest I wasted’):
It is said of me that when I was young I divided my time impartially among wine, women and song. I deny this categorically. Ninety per cent of my interests were women. (New York Times, 21 November 1937.)
So all of the technical preparation – what Garson refers to as the ‘hard work of chops, and scales’ – is only a means to the end of moving the audience emotionally, and ‘communicating love’. When that happens, he says, ‘I’ve done my job’.
Garson recalls one moving experience from the mid 1990s which has often motivated him since. He had always loved playing that ‘war horse’ of classical repertoire, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor, from the age of about twelve. On this occasion he heard a particularly perfect and moving performance of a Rachmaninoff concerto, so expertly played and conducted that, unusually, it left him feeling inadequate and dissatisfied with his own work and accomplishments. He felt ‘small’ as he reflected on the ‘little notes’ he plays in rock and jazz, that much of it meant nothing compared with the complexity and genius he was listening to. He says he felt in that moment more depressed than at any other time, because he was allowing himself ‘the biggest mistake which any artist can ever make, which is comparison…’ He spent a couple of hours contemplating giving up playing. But then he happened to pass by his Disklavier, which he kept permanently in record mode to capture any inspired improvisations. In the next thirteen minutes he played and thus composed instantaneously his own Sonata Number 3 in G Minor. It is undeniably a masterpiece of modern classical composition on every level, quite breathtakingly so. This turned things round for him, as it occurred to him that this level of instantaneous composition would be something Rachmaninoff himself may not have been able to do. It reminded him of his own powers, that everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, and that we must each keep doing what we do best, working on ourselves without comparison to others’ achievements.
In a lighter-hearted parallel recollection to that epiphany, he tells another Rachmaninoff-related story. He was employed in the 1980s and 1990s by Yamaha to record hundreds of the floppy disks they sold for use with their Disklavier. These would generate a recreation of his performance in which the keys and pedals would move up and down and real hammers would hit the real strings, as a fully detailed virtual ‘memory’ of what had been played. They also converted some 1930s recordings which were discovered, which had been played by Rachmaninoff himself on the player-piano predecessor of the Disklavier. As a practical joke he set one of these performances by the great Russian composer and pianist to run, and left the room. Susan, who was not aware of this new technology he was using, heard her husband’s grand piano being played beautifully and entered the room only to find the keys moving up and down and nobody in sight. She was speechless, as it seemed the ghost of Sergei Rachmaninoff had come to modern California to play for them.
7 - Breaking down barriers
‘What can Mikey do? He can go from classical jazz and then sit down and play raucous barrelhouse piano like a real guy – he’s not faking it! That’s a rare bird. I don’t really know anyone on this planet that I’ve sat in a room with, or even listened to for that matter, who can do what he does, the way that he does it.’ – Earl Slick on Mike Garson
GARSON IS WELL KNOWN FOR the diversity of the styles in which he performs. Once he is on any kind of live concert or recording he works ‘in the moment’ and does his best to deliver the best he can within that genre of music. The hardest point for him is the changeover from one genre to another. It is those transitions which he says he finds the most challenging. On one occasion he had been commissioned to rewrite and arrange some of the works of Duke Ellington for a string quartet and opera singer, as well as a jazz sextet and jazz singer, at the Kennedy Centre, Washington DC. Two days later, he was performing rock music with Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails at the Wiltern in LA. Once in either situation he was fine, but the switch whilst travelling (literally and metaphorically) between them was horrendous. This is no doubt because the policy of living in the moment, whilst providing the best system for authentic performance within each situation, does not provide for the journey between them, which in this sense is not a real moment. The story also illustrates, however, just how diverse his work is.
Bowie once described Garson as the best rock pianist in the world ‘because he doesn’t play rock’. This statement was followed within months by Garson’s inclusion in Melody Maker’s top pop pianists of the world, alongside Elton John and Stevie Wonder. This paradox still defines Garson’s music. He works across the artificial musical boundaries around which others tiptoe. He happily confesses to a lack of familiarity with rock music and even the Bowie repertoire, telling me, ‘You know the Bowie stuff better than me; it’s not the music that resonates with me – I mean he has some songs that changed my life, in terms of how great they are. But I live in the world of classical jazz, and I think that’s what he loved about me.’ Garson recalls Bowie’s advice when playing for Nine Inch Nails not to ‘play rock’ but to do his own thing:
I listened to that and respected it, because I’m really not a rock pianist. I’d say you’re a rock pianist, with jazz flavourings, but I think you, literally, live in that world and come from that world. I came from a classical tradition – very classical – for many years with Juilliard teachers and everything, and then jazz was a puzzle for me that I wanted to de-codify and demystify, and I did it because people said ‘you can’t play jazz’ and I wanted to prove them wrong, and show that it can be figured out. Everybody said ‘you can’t study it – if you can’t feel it, forget it’, because I didn’t feel it, I had bad rhythm, and I didn’t know the vocabulary… So, I found all these great teachers, had a great ear, had perfect pitch, I took the solos down, I notated…
This raises important questions about the nature of jazz. If Garson was able to ‘de-codify’ the genre using his musical intelligence and classical training to reach the accomplishment and acclaim that he has in the world of jazz, this must make us question the arcane mystery which so many jazz players claim for their craft. It also suggests that to some degree feeling can be learned or acquired.
Most of Garson’s life has been dedicated to pursuing his musical path without allowing artificial obstacles to impede him. And amongst the most significant obstacles have been the boundaries which are set up between various musical genres. Garson is extremely versatile and adaptable in his playing. He ‘lives between the cracks’ and does not fit neatly into any of the categories of music, whether jazz, pop or classical. He could be a great pianist in any one of those specific genres, along with rock, or fusion, but says he would hate such limitation. As
long as he can simply play what he feels in any moment, he is content.
It is interesting that when composer Gunther Schuller coined the term ‘Third Stream’ in 1957 to designate music, often improvised, which was neither jazz nor classical but a new genre half way between them, he found that the most strenuous objections came from jazz musicians who saw this as an ‘assault on their traditions’, even though the classical world has a far longer heritage to protect.25
This building of closed orthodoxies, with egotism and one-upmanship in place of the freedom and collective openness of true creativity, has been a sorry feature of many areas of human endeavour. In religion and political systems, as well as in music, codes are set up in order to exclude those without access to their mysteries. This in turn stems from insecurity within people, seeking solace in belonging to a superior inner circle. Garson observes that ‘ultimately, they have to mature from that – it’s a spiritual evolution where you have to grow out of that’. It is an important fact that throughout the majority of human history and pre-history, in hunter-gatherer societies, there was no permanent delineation between performer and audience. Singing and dancing were simply a collective activity in which everyone took part. It is possible that individual performances were judged or appraised as such, but all sang or danced. It is only in the past few hundred years (very recently, in terms of the lifespan of homo sapiens) that we have created this artificial wall, dividing performer from audience.
Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson Page 10