Kris Pooley was good enough to let me hear a recording of this performance and it was absolutely stunning. Reunited with his Bowie bandmates, the three of them really let rip. It had been decided to allow the ending to play itself out freely, which meant suspending the time-code elements of the programme, with lighting, video and backing held whilst the live performance ended. ‘Everyone had to be on board, because time code was going to stop, they had to jump out of their automatic programme changes so we had to let everyone know, “Let’s not have the lights go off”!’ explains Pooley. As he stood aside to watch he was amazed at what Garson did. ‘It was a purely punk-rock moment, in the context… it took a really sharp left turn!’ This was a pop concert, in Vegas, after all, and there was something strangely subversive about Garson’s performance. That day his jazz licks were faster than ever and took on a new colour, from being played against a strong and funky pop beat unlike anything he had played with previously. The performance ends dramatically and we can hear guitarist Warren Fitzgerald exclaim at the end, ‘Wow! God Damn!’ and start clapping.
Pooley, who has also toured with Katy Perry, Kesha, Morrissey, Siouxsie Sioux and Smashing Pumpkins, is a long-standing friend of Garson and has a lot of insight into his life and work. They first met soon after Pooley had moved to Los Angeles in 2001, and he recalls that Garson was extremely kind and generous, finding work for him and being supportive of him, clearly keen to help a young pianist who was also jazz trained and was trying to make a go of it. By then, Garson had already recorded with Gwen Stefani and, coincidentally, Pooley would go on later to become her musical director.
Their first meeting was when Pooley was assisting Garson and David Arana with producing Yamaha Disklavier disks on which Garson would play over famous pop or jazz recordings, from Celine Dion to John Coltrane or Counting Crows, so that people in their homes could see as well as hear what he had played, together with the original CD, on this modern player-piano. Some of them were albums which he had played on originally himself, so he would be inventing a second piano part and playing it with his own first part. Some of the keyboards in the range at that time were not fast enough in their action to keep up with Garson’s ‘lightning left-hand speed’, and Pooley had to adjust the MIDI information to make it more easily playable by the automatic action. In other cases, his subtlety and finesse in playing really quiet notes inside clusters of chords did not have sufficient velocity for the Disklavier keys to be activated. It would have spoilt the effect simply to increase the volume of these notes, so they had to clean up the MIDI data in more subtle ways.
In explaining this, Pooley incidentally expresses a wonderfully accurate summary of some key features in Garson’s playing, such as using classical or avant-garde stylings in the right hand mixed with frenetic, boogie-woogie- or blues-influenced rolled notes and clusters in the left hand; a lot of modal stuff; block voicings; and all of this laid over deceptively simple chord progressions. He throws pop music into stark relief by playing modes over it in a way which is unique to him. This is why certain artists want him on their material, Pooley emphasises: ‘They want the big question mark, which stretches your ear over what otherwise would be fairly standard harmonic patterns which they are using.’ Pooley trained extensively in jazz, to the point where he no longer liked it so much; but he is especially interested when he hears Garson using his jazz skills in other contexts, or performing his own classically oriented works of original composition through improvisation. They have remained in contact through the years and Pooley still admires Garson’s distinctive style.
13 - Teaching people to find
their voice
‘Once I dissected the pig and made spare ribs and chopped liver, I knew I was meant to be in the music department!’
– Mike Garson, on giving up studying medicine
GARSON HAS ALWAYS ENJOYED THE process of teaching as part of his repertoire of communication and is happy to pass on his skills, at whatever level, ever since he was first asked at the age of seventeen by a young girl from his school to show her how to play like him, to which he said, ‘Right, give me three dollars and I’ll start teaching!’ He takes the view that the student cannot do anything wrong, in that it is up to him to get them to achieve what their dream is, which can be anything they ask for. He recalls one woman, working as a secretary in someone’s office, who had no desire to work as a musician but simply wanted to learn ‘all of the old-school blues licks in C, not even jazz blues, but old-time blues, like Meade Lux Lewis or Doctor John’. He did this with her for a whole year, at the end of which she shook his hand, said thank you, and left.
I never saw her again. Looks like she lived happily ever after. Then, one girl came, about ten years later – she says, ‘I just want to play New Age music, and I only know a few chords, and I don’t like jazz. I don’t want to read, I don’t want to play classical, I don’t want to play scales, I don’t want to play Bach, I don’t want to open a page of music, I just want to play for you what I sit and do at home. I sit at my piano, and I play five or six hours a day over an A minor and G chord, and I just keep playing.’ She says, ‘I just love doing it.’ So I said, okay. I’d sit on the couch, and she’d start playing. I’m listening to her for a half-hour, forty minutes. Finally, I fall asleep. I wake up an hour later, she’s still playing. I said, I apologise, is that okay? She said, ‘Oh, no problem, go back to sleep… I’m learning, I’m good.’ And, we did this for a few years. She made a record – she loved what she did. She became pretty good at New Age piano playing. And, three years later, I get an email – she’s working on her first symphony. She went to study orchestration with somebody; she learned how to score; she learned how to read music. She did it when she wanted to do it, but when she was with me, she just wanted to do that other thing.
Given the goal of New Age music to be relaxing, perhaps his falling asleep was the best compliment he could pay her. He does not mind what or how someone wants to learn provided they have a commitment to, and passion for, their own goals. Many of his former students went on to become highly successful in different ways. Vonda Shepherd, who was the featured singer-songwriter in the television series Ally McBeal, had been a student of his when she was only fourteen.
He has had some unfortunate assignments, however, such as one student who could barely play at all and yet would pepper the lessons with enquiries about David Bowie and to some extent about Garson himself. Garson’s wife Susan had this student pegged as a stalker using the lessons to get access to Garson, though he took longer to suspect this and recounts this anecdote, like so many others he tells, with the most hilarious deadpan delivery:
I started to get the idea, this is just an obsessed fan, he’s got another agenda, he’s just willing to pay for the lesson to really talk with me… But, I kind of went into denial, this couldn’t be, you know? I should’ve known when I saw him hiding behind the bushes when I opened the door one day, and saw him sneaking around! Anyway, this went on for a few lessons, he brings his keyboard to the lesson, and the keyboard had a sequencer and, as you know, a sequencer’s like a modern-day tape recorder. He says, ‘Can you play for me on this so I could study it at home? What you played on the Aladdin Sane album for David Bowie?… I can go home and study it, and slow it down.’ I thought it was a pretty creative idea on his part. So, I played this very advanced solo, thinking to myself how’s he going to play this, he can’t play a C scale, but this is what he’s asking for, I’ll give it to him. I get a call about a month later, and the guy is in tears. I said what’s the matter? You know, I was very concerned. He says, ‘Well, I have to confess to you, I took this recording which you made, and I brought it to this young rock band that had just signed with a big label, who’s looking for a keyboard player, and I played him this thing, and told him it was me playing… And they said, “Come to the studio next Monday, we’ll have a big nine-foot piano for you to play on our album”.’ So, he goes to their studio, and he sits down, and he starts, like barely pl
aying the C scale. And they’re hysterical, laughing, the rock band, they thought he was putting them on. So they said, ‘OK, let’s record now!’ And he starts going [hums], and they realised this guy was a fake. They wanted to kill him because they had booked studio time and everything. Now this guy was delusional and out of his mind. I said, ‘What were you thinking? Now I can’t teach you any more, you know, I can’t help you, you’re not here with the right motive, you did a dishonest thing.’ Furthermore, the band had said, when they first heard the recording, ‘Hey, you sound a little like Mike Garson! You know, we think you’d be good in this band!’ Of course, it was me playing, so it should sound like me. Wasn’t as great as I play on record for David Bowie, because I was playing on this little keyboard, and trying to give him a rough idea, but still it was good enough to get into this band, and for them to want to hire him on sight!
Another time a man had accidentally heard Garson play in a club, as he was starting in accountancy and had walked into the wrong doorway, the club being next to the accountants’ office. He said he liked the idea of being a pianist instead and was impatient to be converted to that by Garson, who had to explain that this was something which would take several hours a day for many years. He soon capitulated, confirming that he had already spent the past four years in school preparing to be an accountant and was not prepared to put that sort of time into the piano, as he was doing graduate studies now in accountancy. Such whims are common and easily redirected, and Garson simply pointed him back into the correct door, quite literally.
He taught a former military man in his seventies. He had been a colonel in the Marines with secret intelligence information during the Second World War. They would joke about this, and Garson would tease him to reveal the nature of the operations he was involved in but he would never divulge anything, except that he had loved playing the piano earlier in life and now it meant a lot to him to return to that simple pleasure. He had as a younger man played old standards like ‘Up a Lazy River’, and wanted to get back to that in his old age. He said, ‘I’m preparing for the next life!’ Garson spent two years trying to teach this man not to add a fifth beat to one of the bars when playing in four time. Then one day it occurred to him, ‘He was not going to play with a bassist and drummer, and he was not going to Carnegie Hall, so why not leave the guy alone? So I started to say, “Good for you, Matt, you go for it.” He died a few years later but this meant a lot to him.’
Another excellent principle of teaching espoused by Garson is to recognise and praise what is great in what a student is doing as much as identifying their weaknesses, aiming for a fine but essential balance between building on what they have, to give them validation and confidence, and dealing with the flaws. This may sound obvious but it is extraordinary how much music teaching has traditionally failed to take this balanced approach. Garson credits his lively and off-the-page approach to teaching to what he has learned from playing in the world of rock music, where the methods of learning and communicating new songs are diametrically opposed to the way in which he had originally been trained. Many people find they learn better by hearing or imitating than by reading symbols on a page. He still has books on his shelves about ‘How to Write a Fugue’ and to this day ‘cannot get past the tenth page’.
His own composition and harmony teacher had been Robert Starer. For a final assignment he was meant to compose in a baroque style with no parallel fifths or octaves. Mischievously, he intentionally wrote every melody note with a parallel fifth or octave, but Starer said that he could not give him an F as his doing it so wrongly proved he must have known how to do it correctly, so he said, ‘I’ll give you a D, and get outta here!’ In three lessons from Herbie Hancock he felt that wonderful sense of the transmission of something. Hancock spoke of his love for Ravel, Miles Davis and Oscar Peterson, just played a few things, and showed him a particular diminished scale. Hancock heard Garson ten years later and said he could not believe how far he had progressed, as Garson was soloing some basslines with his left hand, which Hancock said he would not have been able to do in the same way.
Amongst the many teachers Garson himself had been trained by, there was Hall Overton who had done the arrangements for Thelonious Monk’s big-band albums of 1959 and 1963. He was teaching at Juilliard but had a great jazz understanding and had made his own transcriptions, taken by ear, of Monk tunes which at the time had not been published. There was also an exceptional young teacher named Larry Schubert, who was the best at breaking things down and really explaining the structures of jazz. There was also his visit to Bill Evans for one long lesson, as described earlier. All of this was between the ages of about seven and twenty-seven, whereas from the age of twenty-eight until the present time he set himself the challenge of ‘unlearning’ it all and restudying everything on his own terms. Those early years had seen him giving full vent to an almost compulsive discipline and exhaustively methodical approach.
I dissected solos… I used to slow down the tape recorder to exactly half the speed, so that it was one octave lower, and I would notate it note-for-note; the left-hand chords, and the right-hand lines, and I would practise it with the tape recorder, then I’d bring it up to speed. Sometimes I’d take a four-bar phrase I liked out of it and learn it in twelve keys, and then take one line of the four-bar phrase and alter it. Make five versions of my own, and pick my favourite version of those. Then play that in twelve keys, and then I’d do that with another four-bar phrase, and then I might also have thirty-two bars, and write it out, and I’d have one whole solo which I’d learn, take that solo and learn it in twelve keys, and then go on to another song, you know? There was a period of six months, I think I only played ‘Stella By Starlight’ every day.
He finds it hard to prescribe how best to acquire jazz skills now as each person has individual needs, though to acquire a swing feel and jazz vocabulary he suggests starting with Dixieland, through to bebop and on to avant-garde. He sees a lot of European jazz musicians and teachers starting to move things forward in new ways in recent years, where previously they had merely imitated American trends. There has also been a refreshing revival of interest in Ellington, Armstrong and so on led by modern exponents such as Wynton Marsalis. However, he notes a tendency to fossilise jazz now as a new classic form, whereby people are playing ‘written’ solos or merely imitating the bebop of Charlie Parker or Miles Davis.
He still does not see himself as primarily in the jazz tradition. He grew up listening to Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven and learning to play Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor or Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. By borrowing the improvisational model from jazz and applying it to classical music he is being more true to himself than if he were just to play straight jazz, as this combination epitomises his roots and gives expression to a wider cross-section of his personality.
He has followed quite a circuitous route in many ways. At seventeen he was playing with Dave Liebman and Randy Brecker at the Town Hall in New York, and they were playing his compositions, but then people started to convey the idea that he should be sounding like Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Coltrane, Sonny Clark or Phineas Newborn and so it took him years to study all of that before coming back to find his own voice again. Now when students come to him he assesses each one differently to determine what they most need, and this assessment is a cornerstone of his teaching method. His studio sits only twenty feet from his house and yet after working there sometimes for sixteen hours and losing track of time he barely makes it back to the house and sleeps in the studio. He feels it has become a beautiful space in which to create, now redolent with the music of all those who have passed through its walls or had their compositions worked on there.
His sound now is very distinctive. The greatest compliment I have received as a pianist was being told on certain occasions that my playing sounded like his. And I take great comfort from his success in the face of all of these negative and proscriptive attitudes which he has come up against throughout his profes
sional life, many of which sound only too familiar to me as a fellow pianist. His theorising or philosophising about music and creativity acquires credibility through his ongoing hard work, practising relentlessly to refine his technique. His work ethic has become his guide for filling in what he calls the ‘missing instruction manual’ and finding ways, for example, to help overcome the fear which so many musicians experience when they go on stage. They are not pre-warned about that, he says, and many end up resorting to drugs to deal with the nervousness. He returns frequently with an almost missionary zeal to the idea that we need to spread the idea of connecting to something bigger and deeper through an exploration of artistic creation:
I believe people want to hear this sort of communication. Not everybody wants to hear just about the sex and the porno, and the bodies, and the food and the diets, and the heart attacks, and the cholesterol. I think we’ve had enough of that. You know, we’ve had enough of those conversations. I think everybody is innately connected to God, and is God, and everybody, innately, wants to talk their version of this. It could be connected with computers or software, or connected to finances or business, or medicine, or piano playing, or viola playing…
The principles of this approach are spontaneity and openness: letting a conversation or a lesson be guided by whatever questions are posed at the time rather than bringing a prescribed set of answers to the table.
Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson Page 22