Those first impressions have been confirmed with time. He jokes that, given the genuinely guru-like wisdom which he felt was being imparted by his mentor, it seemed apt that on first visiting him he discovered that the home from which Garson was sending such valued advice is situated ‘at the top of a mountain’, or at least, half way up. In the intervening years, Becker’s own accomplishments have also been exceptional and he has generously provided much further insight to Garson’s music, and especially the way in which his ‘Now’ Music works. Becker has the highly developed technical virtuosity as well as the emotional understanding and versatility to do justice to Garson’s compositions. Several of these recordings can be heard online and have been very well received, especially his interpretation of Garson’s Ballade in G-Sharp Minor, which has proved of particular fascination to other concert pianists.53
On hearing in 2011 Becker’s own compositions made during the previous seven years, Garson said something which has powerfully inspired Becker in his work ever since. He noted that Becker was in the first stage of his development as a composer, and suggested that: ‘Something tells me I can push you to and through the next stage because I’ve not only been there but I understand your creativity and how to go deeper with you… you have done your homework and now are ready to throw it all away.’ It is Garson’s view that the essential groundwork of technical and musicological hard graft must be undertaken, as something of a baptism of fire in self-discipline; but that this knowledge must then be superseded or put aside in order to attain fresh creativity.
Inspired by this, Becker then went on to compose his Piano Sonata No. 1 and his Enticements & Eternity, both of which have since won numerous awards. Becker describes some common features between his own works and those of Garson (and credits Garson’s influence here too, though Becker already exhibited some of these elements himself), such as ‘intensity of gesture, harmonic adventurousness’, jazz-like lines ‘ripping across the keyboard’, a sense of the wild, and improvisational methods used to compose pieces which end up fully notated. Alongside his classical work Becker also fronts and writes for a highly credible rock music project, Kris Becker & The Frozen Heat.54 He is delighted that Garson has also at times been inspired to create something new in response to receiving a new piece by Becker ‘even occasionally referencing my titles in his new work. The synergy also occurs when he hears a performance of mine of some other repertoire and subsequently feels led to write a new piece. He and I are always looking for new sources of creative fire.’
Having now evolved into a prominent interpreter and performer of Garson’s compositions, Becker has a keen insight into the concept of ‘Now’ Music. He explains how the idea here is to focus on newness, to capture the feeling of the moment, but to do so with a powerful arsenal of musical tools, resulting in something which is well constructed and challenging on every level, something which can then be transcribed, studied and performed. Becker is a highly accomplished, award-winning classical pianist and describes these pieces, once transcribed, as ‘concert pieces of complexity and coherence with much attractive and memorable content, satisfying and stimulating to play and hear. To compose music like this through pure improvisation is insanely difficult.’ These observations might be heeded by those critics from the classical establishment who have often condescendingly dismissed Garson’s compositions because of his disrespect for conventional boundaries or methods.55
It is important to distinguish between the relaxed improvisation for its own pleasure which many may engage in, and the focused discipline of this form of composition via improvised classical-sensibility or ‘concert’ music. Garson has long worked to develop the ability to make judgements in real time, which other composers have the luxury of long contemplation over, such as the most desirable length of a section or of the piece as a whole, how far to take a motif, how much development an idea is worthy of, and so on. Through all this there is also a fine balance between intellectual, technical precision and the emotional expression which drives the music. Becker observes that:
Mike’s piano music comes from an unadulterated pianist’s approach. Since it is conceived via playing, it follows this would be the case… one can sense Mike’s technical breadth and specific feel for the piano in touch and sonority through the music… I know for myself how ‘physical’ composing can be: my hands like to find and do certain things and this no doubt shows through for Mike as well. While much of Mike’s work is highly challenging to learn and play… it is extremely playable in the hands even with its virtuosic demands, much like Chopin or Liszt.
Becker has studied, analysed, performed, interpreted and memorised many of these creations note by note. He finds, as a highly accomplished pianist, that playing them is both as challenging and as rewarding as playing many of the masterpieces written in more traditional ways by Chopin or Rachmaninoff. This speaks volumes for the success of Garson’s project, since about 1990, to harness improvisation as a tool of composition. The elements of jazz and classical styles within his influences and sensibilities are interwoven throughout. Becker singles out Garson’s Ballade in G-sharp Minor as his favourite. Garson also says that he had been keen to have someone other than himself perform it since creating it in 1998. Of the Nowtudes, Becker comments that the C-sharp Minor stands out for its passion and intrigue, whereas the A Minor and D Major have ‘surreal’ textures. In Garson’s Elegy, he hears traces of both Bill Evans and Messiaen. One of his favourites is Garson’s Dvorak Largo Variations, whilst one of Garson’s own favourites is the F-sharp Major Nowtude, which he has arranged for other mediums. The Prelude in G-flat is described by Becker as ‘gorgeous, touching, from the heart’. It was orchestrated and retitled Grace as a movement for the Symphonic Suite for Healing. These are just a selection from the thousands of sonatas, nocturnes, preludes, suites, ballades, hommages and other pieces which Garson has created.
In a series of recorded conversations from 2005 between Garson and his long-term friend and orchestrator/copyist, Bruce Donnelly, we really get to the heart of his working methods and approach to music and to life in general. Donnelly is a highly respected composer in his own right and has orchestrated on several major Hollywood films, as well as playing piano with the San Diego Symphony and Chamber Orchestra.
As an amusing starting point, Garson recalls a presentation he and Jim Walker had done for Yamaha in which the company insisted every word be scripted and checked. Walker had complied whilst Garson had refused. When Garson was MC’ing one of their festivals for young classical pianists, however, and the same rule applied, he submitted a script for approval and then ‘when I went up for the final show I changed it around. They haven’t called me since then! But I felt more honest about the action!’ He contrasts his improvisational approach to performance with the more disciplined temperament of those great artists, whether classical masters like Rubinstein and Horowitz or top singers on Broadway, who are able to perform exactly the same notes night after night, albeit with slight variations of interpretation. Garson explains how such repetition is not within his nature:
I met a guy who gave a lecture on digestion a few weeks ago. This guy was the funniest guy I’ve ever seen – he made the subject the most interesting I’ve heard (it’s the most boring subject) and he told me, the following day – he’s a chiropractor – I went to visit him, he said this is the six hundredth time he’d done the same lecture. Word for word, the jokes and everything! And, I can’t play the same lousy piece once. I almost got in a fist fight with Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins! We were doing the music for the movie Stigmata, and there was a scene that I saw, going by on a roof, and I sat down at the piano and played. He said ‘That’s great!’ and I knew I’d nailed it. Then he said try it again. I tried it again, and it was different. He got very upset – he said can’t you play the same notes? So, I played it again, trying to remember the same notes. He said, well, they’re the same notes, but the phrasing is different. So, he kept… he thought I was messing w
ith him. Corgan said he could repeat a guitar solo and by the seventeenth time it would be really amazing. But if you don’t get it out of me on the second or third time, it’s downhill. I might go home and practise it a thousand times, but if you don’t get it from me at the start, then… I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to cultivate the ability to play in the moment, because that’s what my music has been, with jazz and with classical.
Lennie Tristano, with whom Garson studied, had that spirit; he ‘didn’t want you repeating your licks’, whereas perhaps eighty per cent of the phenomenal performance of Oscar Peterson could be from the classical tradition in terms of its programmed structure rather than spontaneity. Garson has created thousands of classical pieces which he now barely knows as he has handed them to classical pianists to perform. He may return to the discipline of classical performance at some point but made a decision a long time ago to concentrate on pushing back the boundaries and possibilities of improvisation as a way of letting music live ‘in the moment’. If he returns to writing with pencil and paper, he doubts he could compose better than Bartók, Stravinsky or Chopin, but, he asks, did they develop their improvisational skills as much as he has? Probably not, as he has devoted nearly half a century to this form of composition, whilst continuing to respect and admire those who work differently. He mentions Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm TV comedy for HBO which is mainly unscripted, as well as the flourishing traditions of ‘improv’ comedy and even film dramas without scripts.
This was the essence of his term ‘Now’ Music which he coined in 1995 but which has since become an increasingly commonplace idea. He avoided the term ‘improvised music’ at that time in order to break its association with jazz and to expand the method back into classical forms which is where in any case it first began. There is a compelling honesty about capturing how you feel at any one moment, regardless of the vocabulary being used. Only a certain percentage of performances, and indeed of improvisations too, fall into the ‘magic area’ or special zone of ultimate inspiration and beauty. Such successes, Garson says, tend to occur ‘when I’m getting out of the way of myself’, and losing all self-consciousness. The same variability of quality may have applied to the classical composers, as the discovery of some unpublished works by Chopin may be said to have shown, since they seem to lack some of the genius of those which we know best, suggesting that only the best were prominent enough to endure.
Garson’s spiritual beliefs are directly tied in with his musicianship. He sees true musical inspiration as involving a connection to something much larger than himself. He may have worked hard to perfect the technical expression of this but he is keenly aware of the significance of that special added ingredient which, he says, must make the difference between two artists who have worked equally hard or reached the same degree of technical competence and yet differ in their creation of something truly special. Getting out of the way of yourself is a process almost impossible to teach or learn, as by discussing or trying this you then inevitably bring the mind and the self in. He says that ‘somehow we separate out and create individualities for whatever reason but when we get into a special moment we connect back to that source’. He cannot credit his musical inspiration purely to his own ego, training or individual personality, however much of himself there may indeed be in this process. Yet he also desists from the false humility of denying his role as, after all, the ‘whole’ to which he sees himself connecting also encompasses himself alongside everything else.
Nor does he see shortcuts to accessing that. Keith Jarrett can be seen sitting still sometimes for a minute or two before starting one of his improvisations, presumably a form of prayer or meditation to get ‘centred’, but for Garson there is no guarantee there either:
I just sit down and play it. It’s like I either get it or I don’t… there’s no real scarcity: I could sit down and do it again a minute later, or a day later, so, you don’t want to get hung up on the moment of the time. I’ve rested for twelve hours, and I’ve eaten perfect, and I play a lousy show one time. I’ve missed planes. I was filthy, no shower, dirty when I was on stage. One of the best concerts of my life. You can’t plan these. The only thing you can plan that’ll work is the hard work you do your whole life, to be able to get to where you even deserve the privilege to have this conversation. In 1972 I turned down both Freddie Hubbard and Joe Henderson, as I thought I wasn’t ready for the gig; friends of mine did it, and then on hearing the albums years later… I was playing as good or better… I was scared to go out and do it because of what we as artists do to ourselves.
The plus side of such perfectionism is ‘it keeps you going – and you get great’. The downside is ‘you never go out and play!’ Garson respects ‘a lot of the rock artists who grab a guitar and, within a year, they learn three or four chords, and they’re writing songs, and they’re communicating’. As time goes on he finds he keeps rediscovering simplicity in music. The reason something works may have complex harmonic, mathematical or psychological reasons behind it, but often it is the most simple progressions which carry the most compelling beauty. He has also found that the older and better he gets, the more he realises how relatively little he knows. From thinking he ‘knew it all’ in his twenties or thirties he now sometimes feels that he only has a tiny fraction of the musical knowledge or understanding available.
What happens in his mind at the moment of improvisation? Does he think about how long a solo might run? When at his best, he says, he is thinking nothing. We are taught to think of time as linear but it can just as well be conceived of as circular or stacked vertically, but ultimately there is only the moment. There have been times when he has found himself thinking about a mistake from two bars earlier and if so the chance of the finest creativity is lost. During the learning process there have been times when what he hears himself playing has led to what he plays next, but such a process can be too intellectual and only when that is transcended can the best creativity occur.
Beethoven used his genius to develop an initial ‘improvised’ inspiration, a theme or phrase or movement, into a finely crafted masterpiece possibly carved out over months. Garson’s ‘Now’ Music takes this special moment and celebrates it spontaneously. He says that whilst his material may not be at that level he has nevertheless had moments where he truly feels that degree of magic in the initial instant, but that the long process of memorising and crafting from that is not where his gift lies. He is joyful instead to work with the art of improvising, with its succession of spontaneous present moments.
There is consolation and encouragement for many a frustrated young musician in the way that he describes his own struggle to achieve musicality in his earlier days. He is happy to deal with the question of how he was able to progress:
I’ve been asked these questions at masterclasses for twenty or thirty years. And, I’m never tired of the questions. I’m tired of questions like, you know: ‘What’s it like playing with David Bowie?’ and ‘When did you shave your head?’ you know? I’m not totally tired of them, but I’m pretty tired of them. But, these kind of questions, each person you’re talking to deserves the answer geared to them.
For several years he kept asking himself when his playing would really start sounding like music. He perfected ‘I Got Rhythm’ but it sounded stiff. He asked the bass player and drummer in his trio to ‘walk’ the beat in time whilst he improvised around it; they would laugh. He turned the time around; he would lose his place. He wrote out an eight-bar solo for the piece but would rush it and they would be laughing again. He would try it in another key, and copy a solo by Wynton Kelly or Bill Evans, but it was still not swinging, and sounded stiff. Then one day, after several years of this frustration it finally came together and he started to find his own musical voice. He believes this was just the accumulative effect of his efforts reaching breaking point. But he remembers those days in his twenties as very painful:
I thought it was hopeless at one point. I was totally crazed
one day – I remember sitting in my house saying: Who am I? What do I want to play? What is my contribution?… I would sit there, I would try playing like Herbie Hancock, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Sonny Clark or Phineas Newborn. Because I had the ability to play like all those people or, at least, the superficial aspects of it. I’d play it, and then I’d listen back and say: ‘I hate that!’ Worse than that, I’d try to play like me, and there was no ‘me’, because it was a mixture of them.
He felt humiliated by not having the jazz feel and therefore put himself through the ‘torture chamber’ of ten or fifteen years of virtually non-stop, self-imposed training of technique until he finally found himself able to crack that code, which has left him with even more expressive tools than before. However, he sees the main obstacle to classical pianists stepping into improvisation as being their own lack of self-belief. They believe that they are unable to step into that freedom, and therefore they are. Even Horowitz did not believe he could create something new, so respectful was he of the achievements of Chopin, Schumann or Rachmaninoff. Yet the help he gave the latter on one of his sonatas and his own arrangements of ‘Stars and Stripes’ indicate that he could have been a great composer.
Self-confidence is always key, and Garson says he has often taught students who proved not suited to being pianists and so he has been content to build their confidence in other ways, to help them find their true vocation even outside of music, and set them on that path. He advises against the harsh self-criticism and mutual criticism so common amongst musicians. People picture their old music teachers ‘standing there ready to slap you if you don’t get it right’, and even he still sometimes recalls things which were said to him forty years earlier, which prevented him from doing things and taking chances.
Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson Page 20