Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  In playing on such a variety of recordings, it has been necessary for Garson to be something of a chameleon, and he is happy with the moniker. He knows how to absorb the style of the musicians around him in order to contribute to that sound, whilst at the same time retaining that part of his own style which is unique and distinctive to him. If you listen, for example, to his playing on 1974’s Young Americans album by David Bowie, it is far simpler and less elaborate than the rococo embellishments of songs like ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ and less harshly percussive than songs like ‘Watch That Man’, both from Aladdin Sane, the year before. He had to allow space for his playing to be shaped by the new direction in which Bowie was moving. On the Young Americans album, the ornamentation with which Garson had adorned Aladdin Sane fell to Dave Sanborn’s distinctive saxophone, leaving Garson to sit sensitively and gently in the groove, adding rhythmic depth, with soul and subtlety.

  After Bowie’s retirement of Ziggy Stardust in July 1973, Garson had gone to record the Pin Ups album with him at the Chateau d’Hérouville in France. Elton John had recorded there – it had provided the title of his Honky Chateau album of 1972. Mick Ronson and Trevor Bolder were still on board, for the last time, on this album, though Woody Woodmansey was replaced on drums by Aynsley Dunbar.

  The piano performances on Aladdin Sane had set the bar high for Garson. The style of the next album was very different, though, as it was Bowie’s affectionate homage to the songs he grew up with and loved in 1960s London. This time Garson’s jazz sensibility is reined in, in favour of his gritty and brittle rock style, combining percussive and splintered piano cascades with serried rows of hard chords containing sparse, harsh internal intervals such as fourths and fifths.

  One song on which Garson’s piano especially stands out is Syd Barrett’s ‘See Emily Play’. The song was given a new take on its psychedelic origins through heavy use of the same distinctive piano style which marked the title track of the previous album. It ends with an instrumental mêlée led by Garson’s piano. This long play-out starts with Garson quoting Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ which had been used by Stanley Kubrick as the opening music for his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey – a film which in turn had given Bowie the title for his 1969 song ‘Space Oddity’. The alarming storm of conflicting voices proceeds through an agitated dialogue between piano and violin, and ends with a beautiful string quartet (arranged by Mick Ronson) of J. S. Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E.

  During the Ziggy Stardust tour of 1972-73, Garson had moved with Susan and his daughter Jennifer to England, as that was where the rest of the band were based. They shared a house in Sussex with Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey and his wife, June. Trevor and Ann Bolder also lived nearby. In 1974, when Susan became pregnant with Heather and Bowie embarked on his US Diamond Dogs tour, they moved back to Long Island, New York and then in 1978 on to California where they have remained since.

  Garson has a collection of recordings showing his playing styles at various times in his life, from his teens in the Catskills, through his army band days in his late teens and early twenties, into his early band work with Brethren and various jazz collaborations. There are recordings on an acetate of him playing a version of ‘Quiet Village’ by Martin Denny, and ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ by Gershwin, from Porgy and Bess, when he was only about fourteen. These are in the safe keeping of his lifelong friend, saxophonist Dave Liebman. His musical style was slowly evolving in his teens, with less craft or depth than he was to acquire later and yet, like the photo we stumble across or the younger speaking voice we hear on an old tape of someone, it carries all the same essential elements. The essence of the person is there to be heard in these recordings.

  The two childhood friends followed quite different paths over the years, and it is possible to discern an enduring competitive edge to their friendship. Liebman always remained something of a jazz purist, and for him jazz music is in part an intellectual challenge: ‘We all strove to get better, because this music is a difficult music, and you’ve got to learn it.’ Garson recalls that when he began touring with Bowie, Liebman taunted him for ‘selling out’ rather than remaining true to their shared jazz roots. Liebman went on to play with Miles Davis and remained rather élitist regarding Garson’s role in the rock world. Conversely, these new rock or pop colleagues of his saw him as harder to relate to, as he was a ‘jazzer’. So Garson knows better than most just what a negative impact can come from these boundaries around genres.

  Liebman came with his daughter to see Garson playing with Bowie on the Reality tour in 2003, when they played Pennsylvania near Liebman’s home in the Pocono Mountains. She subsequently persuaded her father to have a good listen to 1973’s Aladdin Sane album, and Liebman wrote to Garson praising it, commenting that he enjoyed recognising, in the title track solo, fragments of various pieces from their youth which Garson had referenced such as ‘Tequila’, some Gershwin and others.

  The doubts which had earlier been voiced by Liebman about the validity of crossing from jazz to pop and back have been a recurrent theme of contention in Garson’s life, so I made a point of discussing this in detail with the acclaimed saxophonist and jazz expert eleven years on from his visit to the Reality tour, with interesting results. What emerges is the self-perception of jazz as being a kernel of intellectual integrity, whereas Garson has found that the soulful feeling inherent in expressive music is at least as compelling in other genres.

  Liebman starts by explaining that when he and Garson were in their impressionable teens in the 1960s people might listen to Bartók, Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix all in the same day. Theirs was the first truly eclectic generation because it was becoming possible to hear every genre of music from all around the world more easily. In addition, no young person living through the explosion of rock and roll in the 1950s and 1960s could remain immune to its social impact. Liebman says that this led young musicians like Garson and him ‘to be eclectic with pride, and to say, “We do switch styles, and you know what? That’s part of our name and game, and it’s okay!” ’ On the other hand, he qualifies this by saying that the goal is still to master something and that if you ‘spread yourself too thin’ then such mastery is less possible, because ‘you’re giving away a little bit of your heart and soul’.

  Garson has indeed spanned various genres, but has limited his field of expression to his highly distinctive style of improvised piano, and in that sense has remained highly specialised. He acknowledges that were he to limit himself further still and exercise this craft purely in the jazz genre, then it may be true that he would advance further his expertise in jazz, but finds the thought of that limitation a very boring prospect. He rejects the notion that one musical form is intrinsically superior to others. Some music is more aesthetically pleasing or spiritually deep, but that can come from any genre. Jazz was never truly in his social background and he wanted to find his own honest forms in which to work.

  The excitement he felt when he heard Coltrane was significant, but he wanted to find his own way to express that essence rather than stick necessarily with the jazz idiom within which Coltrane happened to work. There is a musical essence to be tapped into which does not reside in the techniques of jazz, but rather in the feeling that Coltrane expressed through that language. Garson’s take on this captures the essence of his approach, with all of its spontaneity and sincerity: ‘I need to hear what I hear, when I hear it, and play it as I feel it.’

  Liebman claims that there is a difference between musical fields, which is ‘aesthetic, spiritual, emotional’ rather than just technical, and he contrasts the commercialism and accessibility of pop music ‘which speaks directly to the normal person – you do not have to be an expert to understand it’ with the idea of jazz as something which it is only possible to appreciate with effort and special knowledge: ‘You must get some kind of aural education to understand most jazz, you got to get educated. Pop music is about numbers and it enters into the big business. We know about that world, it�
�s a different intention, and when you’re with people like that you can’t help but be affected by it.’

  It is precisely this insistence on special knowledge, the lack of interest in speaking directly to the ‘normal person’, and the importance of remaining untainted by other genres and even people which has earned the jazz establishment its reputation as élitist and excluding. He concedes, however, that in working with Bowie, ‘That’s the top of the line, you don’t get any further ahead than that in experimental rock,’ and that ‘if anybody could do it, Mike is certainly capable of switching styles and being very credible… he’s always searching, he’s constantly growing.’

  He enjoys receiving the original compositions which Garson sends him from time to time even now, as ‘we have our musical language together’. Despite their differences of outlook, Liebman clearly retains a high regard for Garson’s distinct path and groundbreaking accomplishments. Garson in turn tells me that he has ‘immense respect for Liebman’s dedication to cultivating the jazz heritage and finding new territory’.

  A different angle on this question of moving between genres comes from jazz drummer Joe LaBarbera, who was Bill Evans’ last drummer and who also later played for Tony Bennett. He has played with Garson many times from the 1990s up to Garson’s Symphonic Suite for Healing in 2014, and sees this cross-fertilisation in very positive terms, as bringing something additional to each field, rather than diluting anything. He says that:

  I have to assume that the benefits derived in his jazz playing from the other sources work in the same way when he is approaching classical or pop. I have heard Mike spontaneously improvise pieces at the piano that sound fully composed… Mike is the real thing as a jazz performer. He rarely repeats himself and is always looking for new ways to express himself. When you add these qualities to a complete understanding of the rich tradition of jazz you get a very rewarding experience.

  At twelve, Garson played Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude in C Minor for a celebrated New York classical music critic, who was deeply unpleasant and slammed him for over-pedalling. Even now he recalls the invective unleashed by this critic as being like ‘the plague that no one wants to experience’, and this set back his confidence considerably. Likewise, in jazz he was often told that he would not be able to interpret what was then seen as largely a black idiom, since he was ‘a Jewish guy from Brooklyn’. Then when he was called up by Defries to play with Bowie, he knew nothing about pop or rock music, but was able to use his classical and jazz cadences to effect something new there.

  In the late 1970s, having relocated to Los Angeles, he worked with bassist Stanley Clarke in the jazz fusion style and felt slightly closer to home, since fusion was itself already a mix of jazz, funk and rock to which he added some classical touches; but ultimately he found fusion a dissatisfying genre of music which tended toward superficiality, speed and virtuosity more than toward any deep feeling. Its main redeeming quality was as an exercise whereby you could ‘get your chops together’.

  In the 1980s he went on to work with bebop star trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, a superb trumpeter and a giant of the jazz scene, who played with Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, McCoy Tyner, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. His behaviour, even on stage, could be erratic and unpredictable to say the least. In a jazz club near Venice Beach they played a great set including ‘Up Jumped Spring’ on which Garson performed a long improvised solo with avant-garde and classical elements. Hubbard had some ‘heavy associates’ and they were walking ahead with him after the show, with Garson walking behind. Hubbard suddenly looked behind and said to Garson, ‘What the fuck was that shit you just played?’ Garson replied, ‘Well, Freddie, you know, it’s jazz and it’s just what I heard in my ear, my inner ear…’ They all gave him a dirty look and moved on; but then suddenly Hubbard turned around again and said, ‘Let’s record that shit!’

  Three months later they were playing in Alaska, and on Hubbard’s ‘Red Clay’ (which was an adaptation of Bobby Hebb’s 1966 hit song ‘Sunny’) Garson played a rock-style rhythmic interlude which got the audience clapping along. Once again Hubbard confronted him afterwards. This time, however, after Garson told him it’s just what he heard in the music at the time, he thought for a moment, and declared, ‘Let’s take that shit to Vegas!’ Hubbard plays a beautiful flugelhorn solo on a song of Garson’s called ‘Together Again’, which is on an album by Stanley Clarke called I Wanna Play for You (1979).

  Back in their days at the Catskills, Liebman would introduce Garson to the stage as an entertaining imitator: ‘Now Mike will play like Dave Brubeck!’ Or, later, Erroll Garner. He was not rewarded for sounding original but for sounding like others. Things have remained that way, and he points out that pianists are still rewarded for sounding like certain well known performers, whether Peter Nero, Roger Williams, George Shearing, André Previn, Dr. John, Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein. In his early twenties, Garson would practise for hours on end and record himself playing. He found the results resembled Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner, Bud Powell or Wynton Kelly, but felt sick with frustration as he asked himself where his own identity might fit: ‘Where is Mike Garson?’

  There was one positive aspect to being spurned by the various purists. By being buffeted around between the specific genres, rather than being safely accepted by any one of them, he has remained a more independent and free spirit. Somehow out of all this there finally emerged a strong and original identity, which he had yearned to find in those early days of imitating all the greats. More specifically, it was the call from Bowie and Garson’s subsequent sudden transplantation from the jazz world into the rock world, which helped him to locate his own unique style. Prior to 1972 he was exploring all the myriad styles of jazz and sounding primarily like a bebop player; but this wrenching of his evolving jazz style out of its natural context and its transplanting into the field of rock or pop created a jarring juxtaposition. This helped to liberate his style from the constraints imposed or self-imposed on those who set up home in one of the more rigid sectors of musical production.

  Because I was working in the jazz vocabulary and, at that time, I was learning to imitate all those guys, and I forgot there was… where’s the… ‘will the real Mike Garson please come to the stage?’ He saved my spiritual and musical life, Bowie.

  Even when he started to find this distinctive voice in the 1970s with Bowie, ‘I didn’t even know I found it… because I was still brainwashed by the jazz world.’ In recent years he has also been approached by university music departments keen to appoint him as a visiting lecturer, only to be turned down once they understand fully about the extent of his involvement in the rock world.

  When composing in the 1980s, he tried at different times to draw on Bach, Chopin or something from jazz. It was a question of tuning in to these influences and ‘channelling’ them. It is through this process that he became more spiritual in his beliefs, as he started to strive to connect with whatever they themselves had ‘tuned in to’:

  That’s the message that came to me, that was where it was a little cryptic, that day. It’s like a little voice, but didn’t seem like a voice in my head like when you’re in the mental house – it felt like more of an angelic kind of a communication where I needed a little help from a bigger ‘I’, or whatever. It felt it was a spiritual moment and as if it was that part of my brain they hadn’t discovered – you know what I mean? I would probably have to call it the true ‘self’ as opposed to the individual ego… all of a sudden, my music went to the next level…

  At the point when Garson found himself returning to relative anonymity and home life in the late 1970s, he realised that he had been missing jazz, with its more relaxed and intimate attitude toward time signature and timing, so very different from the frenetic scope of a world rock tour. When the Ziggy Stardust tour had passed through Tennessee for the Memphis date of the tour, some jazz friends had been playing a club gig in a Holiday Inn hotel, so
Garson slipped in to the club to see if he might sit in and play with them. He says they were laughing at him, as he had ‘lost it’ at that point, as a result of being away from jazz for so long.

  He was ready to start reintegrating all of the strands which had been feeding in to his playing. His strong classical foundation would stand him in good stead in helping him to become ultimately comfortable with virtually any idiom: country, rock, bebop, avant-garde, fusion, rock, blues; though always with his own distinctive style. He says that there is a ‘rubber band’ elasticity to his timing, so that he works around the steady beat, which is nevertheless still always there. He describes this as not always having to be ‘in the pocket’. Having first mastered the art of playing perfectly in time, he started to add a floating element around that framework, as well as more complex syncopations. This is a further development from the rubato (‘robbed’ time) which is a feature in Chopin. With jazz we are often slightly behind the beat. Surprisingly, he says that he did not get his timing really straightened out until his twenties or even his thirties:

  I learned poorly rhythmically from the beginning, and I didn’t understand rhythm and time. I understood harmony and melody before I understood time… it allowed me to become a good teacher, because I didn’t have these abilities, so I couldn’t just say to my students, ‘You just feel it and you do it, otherwise get out of here.’ I had terrible timing, and fixed it, so that means I could work with somebody and fix theirs.

  Garson was told that he lacked the elusive ‘feel’ of jazz, the ability to ‘swing’ behind the beat effectively. As a form of rebellion against this jazz orthodoxy he determined, in his teens and twenties, to use his classical discipline and love of music to conquer this challenge. How ironic then that, in the decades since, he experienced numerous examples of being dismissed by the classical establishment for being a jazz person, as well as being scorned by some popsters for his avant-garde jazz or classical background. As he says,