Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  She came to David Bowie’s London BBC concert in 2000 which Garson played on and which was released as part of the Bowie at the Beeb CD compilation that year. He had enjoyed playing with her, she was fun to work with and he liked playing live on her songs such as her cover of Tom Jones’ ‘It’s Not Unusual’ or her rendition of the theme song from the Sidney Poitier film To Sir with Love, as well as her celebrated first hit, ‘Shout’.

  After that first intense and exciting period of working with Bowie from September 1972 to December 1974 had drawn to a close, Garson got a gig playing for a Chinese artist in Belfast, a ‘very average’ singer, at the time when the conflict there was at its peak. In what sounds like the beginning of a joke, he says the band had a Jew, a Chinese woman, a Catholic and a Protestant – he was ‘afraid everyone was going to kill each other!’ He hated playing with this covers band but once again had to do this in order to survive. Even now, he would take on whatever work comes up and whatever work he needs to do in order to support his family, and he is extremely dedicated to looking after them.

  Garson’s first daughter, Jennifer Shuper, born in 1971, remembers falling asleep to the sound of her father practising, composing and teaching, throughout her childhood. Although his home studio was his haven, she and her sister were always welcome and he often played them pieces he had written. She loves music, and sings. Jennifer took piano lessons from her father and has collaborated with him on writing lyrics. She works now as a college professor teaching Spanish at Pasadena City College. She regards her father as ‘a spiritual healer for whom music is just one way that he channels his extraordinary abilities’. She reveals a side of him which perhaps modesty has kept out of my interviews with him, explaining how he has acted as a counsellor to many people, describing him as ‘the best listener and advisor you could imagine’. She adds: ‘He is a master of making everyone with whom he connects feel special and feel understood.’ A few years ago her marriage hit a rough patch and he sat her and her husband down in his studio and proceeded successfully to help them repair the situation, acting ‘as mediator, therapist, spiritual guide and mender of hearts’, something for which she is eternally grateful. Her husband, Peter Shuper, also points out how Papa Mike, as they and their children affectionately call him, has inspired respect through his emotional insight and lack of partiality. They have two daughters, Maya and Hannah, and a son, Jeremy, who sent me this moving comment on his grandfather:

  He’s one of the busiest guys I know and he always makes individual time with me regardless of what his day consists of… I would come to him for something before my closest friends… he’s an incredible person and the best grandfather a young teenager could really ask for.

  His younger daughter, Heather Garson Gilbert, was born in 1974. She is also a teacher and says that growing up in a musical family ‘was amazing – there were always musicians coming in and out of the home, lots of rehearsals, tons of noise and creativity’. She says that they had a great childhood and used their father’s ‘ “healing” techniques and wisdom to become responsible adults’. Regardless of the pressures of touring he always made his family an absolute priority. When she went into labour prematurely with her son, Max, her father was mid-concert at the NAMM show26, but left immediately to be by her side, waiting for Max to be born before he went back. Heather also took piano lessons from her father and dabbled with cello and violin, but says that perhaps it has ‘skipped a generation’ as both Max and her older son, Jacob, are already very keen musicians. Max has played drums since he was two, and often jammed with his grandfather. They performed on stage together as part of Garson’s Symphonic Suite for Healing orchestral world premiere in March 2014. Heather explains that Jacob has autism and has been greatly helped by his grandfather, who has been able to

  bring him out of his shell and help ‘heal’ him. Since Jacob was a baby he always loved listening to music, especially my dad’s. It used to relax him so much that he would bury himself in my dad’s arms and melt into him.

  Now, a few years on, Jacob has started to bond further with his grandfather through a love of the piano. He has started to show an extraordinary ability, even at eleven, to master all kinds of complex modal scales, and will sometimes telephone his grandfather to discuss something like the Dorian or the Aeolian mode, which are beyond the comprehension of many professional musicians. Heather says: ‘I am so thrilled Jacob has found music; it is a great way to express himself.’ Both of Garson’s daughters name ‘Lullaby for My Daughters’ and ‘Song for Susan’ as amongst their favourites. At any performance of these, both daughters and their mother are guaranteed to be in tears. This is a family with a really inspiring degree of love and care for one another, and Garson’s music seems inextricably woven into its beautiful fabric.

  In 1988 Garson was cast to play the piano as Liberace in a biopic film of that name (ABC Movie of the Week). It was a demanding role, reproducing the dazzling pyrotechnic style for which Liberace was famous in both his classical and more popular repertoire. This was long before Steven Soderbergh’s 2013 HBO film, Behind the Candelabra, which for performance scenes was able to use twenty-first-century CGI special effects to simply ‘graft’ the head of lead actor, Michael Douglas seamlessly on to the body of pianist, Philip Fortenberry. In 1988 the methods required were more laborious. Garson’s hands and arms were filmed for those scenes in which Liberace was playing, as a sort of ‘body double’, and these were then alternated with head shots of Andrew Robinson, the actor who played Liberace. Robinson, who was cast partly for his facial resemblance to Liberace, had previously played the killer in the first Dirty Harry film, with Clint Eastwood, and went on later to play Elim Garak in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on television in the 1990s.

  Garson explains how Liberace was an honest entertainer, essentially a showman pianist with an amazing classical gift. He shellacked the piano hammers to create a brighter tone, so that his piano was almost bell-like in its sound. This was all part of his persona. Garson had to live with Liberace’s music for months and record the parts at a recording studio in Burbank, on a beautiful nine-foot Baldwin grand piano similar to those used by Liberace.

  Liberace had a pointedly flamboyant style, with his hands going up into the air, which was all part of his overall projection. He was in fact a very successful communicator because he really connected with his audience, and reached out to people. When Garson was a child, Liberace had a television show based in New York that was on every day, and the young Garson was an avid viewer – this was one of his first influences. He recalls hearing Liberace on screen playing Debussy’s Clair de Lune and then, years later, had to play it himself in Liberace’s style for this film. They brought in as musical director the man who used to conduct Liberace for television, so Garson was directed by the same man all those years later: ‘He had conducted thousands of shows, he never missed one! When Liberace got sick once or twice, this guy played the whole show; and yet I was still hired to be the pianist for this TV movie.’ The musical director might have been able to perform these pieces for the soundtrack, but would not have had as much as Garson of the musical flair required to actually play as Liberace.

  Garson recorded the piano parts for the Liberace film in just three days, but stayed on set for months as he was working closely with the actor, Andrew Robinson. In some shots it would be Garson’s hands and in others it would be Robinson’s which were seen. Garson made most of his income from the film by clocking up all that extra time on set, often going into overtime through the evening. He was called on to teach Robinson to play (he turned out to be quite a fan of Thelonious Monk, and he and Garson became good friends), so that his posture and movement when at the piano would be realistically convincing. This was sometimes challenging, since Robinson’s arpeggios ‘went the wrong way!’

  They had to disengage the action of the piano on set so that it could be played by the actor (and, for close-up shots, by Garson) without making any sound. In a number of scenes they filmed Ga
rson’s hands playing this silenced piano, which felt awkward as he was miming to his own performance, but without the keys he hit making any sound. There is one scene in which we accidentally see his face in a long shot at the piano, rather than the actor’s. He attributes this, with amusement, to the television movie budget being rather different from that of a feature film. They had, however, acquired the use of Liberace’s actual clothes and rings, and he was told he had to lose 18 pounds of weight in two weeks (which he did through a diet of fruits, juices and a lot of water) in order to get the job, so that his arms and hands could take those rings and clothes for the shots of him playing.

  As he sat late every night on the set, happy to accumulate considerable extra earnings, the director urged him on to play higher or harder up the keys. He hammered on this silent piano to give the impression of his playing, for example, Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu – which he had in fact recorded at Burbank months earlier in the style of Liberace. But some nights he found himself playing more like Horowitz. At that point, he recounts that he had the experience of Liberace, who had died just eighteen months earlier, apparently coaching him from beyond the grave. Garson is emphatic that this presence was as real and vivid to him as our interview or any other meeting:

  The director is directing me to play like Liberace, so he’s saying ‘Do this!’ So, I’m doing this, and he’s saying, ‘it’s not up high enough!’ and, I’m bleeding, and the rings are on there, and I’m hitting the piano that doesn’t play back… it’s midnight, and I hear in my head – I swear to you – Liberace appears, with those hands up in the air the way he played, and in his voice, it was hilarious… he coached me from the ‘other side’! And I start doing it, and my body had chills through it, and he said: ‘That’s right!’ And I used that spirit when I played the piece.

  As for the experience of wearing Liberace’s own hairpiece and jewellery, Garson recalls:

  They gave me some rings prior to filming, and said: ‘Try these now, see how they feel, because you’ll be recorded with them.’ They put his wig on my head – looks pretty good – I got a kick out of it, you know? I had hair then, but they still put his wig on, and it had a particular vibe, and I go into Hollywood showing all my friends the rings! On set, they told me they were just costume rings, so as not to worry me. I just walked off set with them on. But it turned out they were his real rings! My phone started ringing at two in the morning – off the hook – ‘Where are you?’ – I had millions of dollars of rings on my hands, walking through Hollywood, showing all my friends!

  Another amusing anecdote from this time comes from Brad Vinikow, a musician and technological consultant who first met Garson in the 1980s when he went to introduce the then groundbreaking new MIDI Grand Piano to him on behalf of Yamaha, and who remains a close friend and collaborator today. At the time, he was due to visit Garson in Bell Canyon with a video crew from Yamaha to film the two of them for a training film on Yamaha equipment. When the door opened,

  It was not actually Mike there to greet us, but Mike dressed as Liberace: complete with wig, huge rings on his fingers and outrageous clothes that only Liberace could wear.

  Vinikow also sheds useful light on Garson’s approach to technology, commenting that from the start the question he asked about the new instruments shown to him was not ‘How does this work?’ but ‘What new creative vistas will this open for me?’ as his mind ‘instantly whirled with possibilities as I demonstrated and explained the instrument’. Another time they worked together to record every national anthem in the world for a multimedia encyclopedia by Microsoft. This protracted process was stressful at times, especially with some of the ‘less than musically satisfying’ anthems, but just when they thought they had finished, they had to start again on the anthems of the newly formed Eastern-bloc countries from the break-up of the Soviet Union. Vinikow speaks with great affection and admiration of Garson, who on their first meeting had a ‘shock of silver grey hair, which exploded in as many directions as his endless musical ideas’, which led him to amicably address Garson ever since as ‘Professor’.

  Garson continues to hold Liberace and his music in high regard, and cites his autobiography as a good read. Liberace’s musical director, on hearing Garson’s rendition of Debussy’s Clair de Lune in the style of Liberace, was amazed that it recalled exactly the way that he used to play it. Garson attributes this less to his months of work for the film than to having absorbed Liberace’s style when listening as a child. It should also be noted that Liberace played his part too in breaking down the musical boundaries between classical and pop music, by creating popular adaptations of well-known classical pieces.

  Another project which began for Garson in the 1980s and flourished into the new millennium was Free Flight, a jazz flute quartet with a classical repertoire, which has made a huge contribution toward the softening of the boundaries between those forms. Founder Jim Walker has played principal flute for the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics as well as the Pittsburgh Symphony and is widely respected as a recording artist in both classical and jazz, as well as being a prolific teacher. He explains how in 1982 original Free Flight pianist Milcho Leviev had left the band, so he was looking for a talented jazz improviser who also had a classical background. He heard Garson playing with his trio at Two Dollar Bills in Hollywood. Walker was originally from Kentucky but has long been based in California. They had an hour-long meeting at which Walker recalls sounding off passionately about things he had ‘been unhappy with in the previous situation’, which they laugh about today. (Walker says, in true Californian style, that he ‘had not really had any therapy at that point’ and that he vented and downloaded it all on Garson.) He appreciated that Garson was ‘a great listener’.

  Walker explains that some of the best crossover or hybrid pianists in the world are based in Los Angeles, so that they can do a lot of different things in the commercial field. Garson was living in California by now, as was Walker, and he had about ten or twelve such pianists available to consider. It became clear, however, that there were very few who could also bring the creative elements which Garson could bring. He had ‘an unbelievable abundance of jazz vocabulary knowledge. There is not anyone who knows the language of bebop and post-bebop harmonies anywhere close to what Mike knows.’

  Garson once again proved able very quickly to assess the needs of the situation, and was willing to meet the demands of both long rehearsals and considerable travel which the band also demanded. He also brought some of his own compositions with him into the band’s repertoire and it quickly became a vehicle for his own ongoing exploration of the meeting of jazz and classical music idioms and his uninhibited combining of these forms. A couple of the first additions to their repertoire which Garson suggested were the First Movement of the Beethoven Waldstein Sonata, and also the Toccata from the Prokofiev Seventh Piano Sonata. Those monumental piano works are very difficult on the piano, but to arrange them to incorporate a flute quartet was an incredible challenge. Walker describes the Prokofiev arrangement as

  one of the highlights of my musical life, that we were able to make that work, and it’s an incredible version. I once played our recording of that to Alexander Toradze, a fantastic Russian classical pianist, who knows the piece very well, and he said: ‘Oh, Prokofiev absolutely would’ve loved it this way – it takes it to the next level!’

  Both of these arrangements can be heard on the 1984 Free Flight album, Beyond the Clouds, which also carried four original compositions by Garson. When Garson joined in 1982 the group had been going for a couple of years and had already had some success, with a recording contract with Palo Alto Records and appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Their unique combination of classical virtuosity, folk spirit and jazz cadences made a big impact. Through the 1990s Garson continued to play for Free Flight despite periods of touring or recording with Bowie and others, but by the early 2000s the pressure and uncertainty of his availability pushed Walker to have to find at least a
partial replacement, which came in the form of pianist Bryan Pezzone. The band in its long-term line-up was therefore finally dissolved in 2004, but since then there have still been occasional outings, with either Garson or Pezzone filling in on piano according to availability. Walker and Garson also sometimes perform concerts as a duo.

  Garson himself says that Free Flight were

  truly an amalgamation of classical and jazz. We were ahead of our time; many bands are doing things like that now but not as good… mind you, we played Hollywood Bowl, the Lincoln Centre, Johnny Carson two or three times, a lot of great art centres throughout the States, masterclasses… though in terms of recording, each of our albums never sold more than about 30,000. But it was a great band, which kept me practising at that time and forced me to push my levels – things I couldn’t do now, because I’m just hearing what I’m hearing when I’m hearing it, so it’s a little different now.

  What makes Garson’s participation in Free Flight of special interest, given the themes which emerge from a consideration of the range of his work, is that here was a project in which he could be creative without feeling any constraint of working within one genre or another. Here it was possible, indeed their very aim, to use the idioms or musical language of the classical, jazz and folk worlds all within the same recording or concert. They took pleasure in including, within the same concert, quiet ballads, rock-driven high-energy pieces, synthesisers with electric flute, piano with acoustic flute, bowed bass; and, as Walker puts it,