Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  In the early 2000s there were several live and broadcast performances of the song ‘Life on Mars?’ in which David Bowie’s voice is accompanied only by Garson’s piano. First there was 2000’s Yahoo Awards at Studio 54 in New York, at which Bowie won the Online Pioneer of the Year Award and his site Bowienet was named Best Artist’s Site, and where they also did a spectacular version of ‘Wild is the Wind’, with Garson’s piano orchestral in its sweep. Then there was the BBC television show Parkinson on 21 September 2002, in which Michael Parkinson interviewed first Tom Hanks and then David Bowie. Bowie performed ‘Everyone Says “Hi” ’ with a full band and was then interviewed, after which he sang ‘Life on Mars?’ accompanied only by Mike Garson on piano. By this time Bowie had taken to performing it in the much lower key of C rather than the original key of F. Mid-song, Garson plays a very beautiful, gentle variation on the original instrumental section, starting with an augmented fourth note moving to the fifth, which is a frequent feature of his music, as it was for Gershwin. After the recording of the show, Tom Hanks came up to Garson and simply said with a big smile, ‘The master of the eighty-eight!’ (referring to the number of notes on a piano), shook his hand and moved on. The show ended with a big band, led by Laurie Holloway, playing Billy May’s arrangement of ‘Skyliner’, originally recorded by the Charlie Barnet Band. Garson stood by the side of the stage and listened in fascination, whilst reflecting that he would be just as much at home playing that music as he had been that evening playing the two songs with Bowie.

  On 8 September 2005 at Radio City Music Hall in New York, the same song was performed, in the same way, at the Condé Nast Fashion Rocks show in aid of victims of Hurricane Katrina. This was an emotional occasion as it was Bowie’s first performance since facing serious health issues the year before. Their only opportunity to rehearse was in the venue that afternoon. The key is dropped further still, this time to B. Yet it all came together and it was an emotional rendition, full of feeling and evoking a tender vulnerability. On 9 November 2006 Garson again played with Bowie, this time at the ‘Black Ball’ for HIV charity Keep a Child Alive. Unlike on the other occasions referred to above, this show at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom did not include ‘Life on Mars?’ but Garson did play for Bowie on ‘Fantastic Voyage’, ‘Wild is the Wind’ and (as a duet with Alicia Keys) ‘Changes’. This show was with a band, but Garson’s piano was heavily featured and he was graciously introduced by Bowie. At the time of writing, in 2014, that was David Bowie’s most recent public performance. In 2007, Bowie curated New York’s High Line Festival and Garson played twice, once with his trio at the Blue Note in Greenwich Village, the other a performance just with jazz violinist, Chris Howes, opening for ‘word jazz’ pioneer Ken Nordine at the Kitchen.

  To understand Mike Garson’s general and ongoing creative impetus it is necessary to recognise him as something of a Renaissance man. For example, he has always enjoyed teaching as well as performing. He now regards ninety-nine per cent of the thousands of lessons he has given over the years as having been a success, whereas perhaps only twenty per cent of his few thousand concerts were great, in his eyes. In the role of teacher he feels he can be more selfless, but on stage, ‘the ego moves in a little bit’. He works strenuously to increase that percentage ‘to at least ninety per cent – in recent years it has been around seventy-five’. The pressure from audiences wanting to be impressed produces the temptation to oblige by showing off what you can do, rather than simply to create joy through the music. Pyrotechnics are one thing, but he derives more pleasure ultimately from playing, for example, a simple ballad of his own such as ‘Lullaby for Our Daughters’.

  Most of the people interviewed for this book have been unreserved in their praise for Garson, so that it has been difficult to explore any criticisms, even in the interests of balance. I invited him to comment on what he would himself regard as his own weaknesses, and he seized the opportunity to identify those issues he continues to work on. He went through a period in earlier years, he says, of being overbearing in his attempts to persuade others to take an interest in his spiritual beliefs, but now takes a more questioning approach.

  He says that he is a slow learner; though when he grasps something, and if it has meaning, he can run with it for a lifetime. Hall Overton, one of Garson’s greatest teachers, taught him so much, so well about harmony and chords that even though it took several months for him to really get it, it then became something which he still uses, all these years later, in all of his work and across all genres. He wants people to know that he worked long and hard through a slow process to achieve the level of performance he enjoys, in the hope that this will inspire others to do likewise, rather than passively assume that he was born to some natural talent which they could not possibly access.

  He also feels his ability to forgive is not as great as he would wish, and that by hanging on to things he is damaging himself more than anyone else. ‘You can be angry or have discussions about something, but just to sit with it for years and let it stew is a little unhealthy.’ He adds that he sometimes has a short fuse, through intolerance. If you feel you have mastered something there is a danger of assuming you are ‘above the law’ and judging others as inferior. This is a trap he believes he got into at times in the past, but has largely overcome now.

  He points out that it is also easy for kindness, compassion and love to drop out of the equation if you ever forget why you are doing creative work, by getting too caught up in all of the technical concerns, meeting deadlines, monitoring standards and so on. You need a system of constant internal gratitude. He has worked hard for his achievements, but still feels thankful for the opportunities, the abilities and the potential which is his and which in this sense has been a gift. Continuing with this rigorous inventory of introspection, he also observes that he can become quite obsessive in focusing too narrowly on something which he is absorbed with. This can produce great accomplishments but can also lead to the neglect of a wider and more open-minded viewpoint.

  We listen to his Mike Garson’s Jazz Hat album, with Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘A Night in Tunisia’ taken at breakneck speed and yet losing none of its passion. Like much of his material it was produced by ‘Prof’ Johnson, who was a great technical innovator and experimented with the early possibilities of digital recording. He would use old valve amplifiers without cases, as he wanted everything exposed to the air, and in some cases he ‘avoided putting tracks on a CD plate, taking the piano recording straight to the mastering lab by bouncing it off Mount Wilson, fifty miles from LA’.

  His work has encompassed a very wide variety of genres and concepts. In 2008, he was approached to work on some of the tracks for a compilation of Jewish music and comedy, The Jewish Songbook, produced by the greatly talented Brooks Arthur, music supervisor to Adam Sandler. This includes a very moving rendition by saxophonist Dave Koz of the old Jewish song, ‘Raisins and Almonds’ (which my own mother sang to me as a childhood lullaby). One of the only songs in the collection which is not comedic, it features some unmistakable playing by Garson. He comments that the song’s depths had not previously been adequately captured on any recording since ‘earlier versions tended to be crummy, cheap, old arrangements by Jewish accordion players’. One of the other tracks Garson plays on is a hilarious performance by Jason Alexander (George Costanza in Seinfeld) of a song ‘by a Jewish comedian from the sixties, talking about Brooklyn and screaming out of the window’.

  In 2009 he produced an album, Fast Jump, by young classical and avant-garde pianist Danny Holt, after a chance meeting had brought them together twice: first when Garson was judging a piano competition and chose this young prodigy as a winner, then some months later when Garson was lecturing at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

  Whilst completing work on this book we learned of the suicide, on 11 August 2014, of comedian and actor Robin Williams. Garson was particularly affected by this as Williams had been a lifelong favourite of his, and hours later he sen
t me a beautiful sonata which he had written fifteen years previously and had always intended to send him.

  Garson was employed by Yamaha to record pieces for their Disklavier player-pianos using sensors sitting on each of the eighty-eight keys like miniature typewriters. He recorded 2,800 pieces for them over fifteen years, including about a hundred of his own, which were then processed for selling on floppy discs which could be inserted into their Disklavier models. This meant that people could have his performance recreated in their homes, with the keys moving up and down exactly as he had played them, and real hammers hitting real strings, rather than just an electronic recreation of that sound.

  He has also been a brand ambassador for the Ivory computerised sample piano produced by Synthogy. Each file of sample piano sounds weighs in at nearly 20 gigabytes, many times greater than earlier generations. There have been times when he needed to record something to a deadline and had problems using microphones on his real piano, as the children were playing outside the studio, for example. By using this extraordinarily high quality digital piano as his direct recording input he was able to achieve results indistinguishable from the real thing. Even the company themselves were fooled on one occasion, thinking that some examples he sent them had been recorded on his real Yamaha grand rather than generated by the computer.

  For some years, Garson was an M-Audio artist and brand ambassador, and was instrumental in testing and giving feedback on the keyboards they made, including being involved in the subtle process of attempting to improve and refine the action of lighter key beds that could mimic the real action of a piano keyboard. M-Audio was founded by Tim Ryan, whose mother was an aspiring concert pianist but who became a prodigious talent himself in the field of music-making technology. He played a key role in modern musical, social and cultural history, through initiating the situation we now take for granted whereby music can be produced and recorded in small and affordable studio set-ups, which are based around a computer. At college in the 1970s, he and two fellow students found that many music industry synthesiser products at that time selling for many hundreds of dollars were costing only tens of dollars to make, and so decided to create their own equivalents and sell them for half the price. He became a pioneer in spearheading the introduction of digital sound processing and the computerisation of the recording process, which has ultimately democratised music production and opened up access to this process for all.

  Ryan first met Garson in about 2000 and they proved to be kindred spirits, becoming and remaining close friends in addition to various work projects together, both through M-Audio and since. In recent years Ryan has organised and promoted jazz concerts in France and Spain at which Garson has been a special guest artist playing alongside some of the local talent, who are delighted to have the bar raised by playing with an international virtuoso of his stature. Garson is also acting as mentor to Ryan’s son, Theo, who plays fretless bass. I spoke to Tim Ryan and he added further insights on Garson’s approach to music and life in general:

  Mike Garson is a consummate professional… he’s always playing, he’s always improving… this is a guy who when he was younger would go to the Lincoln Center Library in New York every two weeks for another stack of classical sheet music, would practise sight reading them all then come back for the next batch. There’s definitely a neo-classical edge to the flavours he adds to Bowie and other rock music. He keeps his body completely drug free. He’s in better shape than all these younger guys in the bands, when he shows up with his energy and his drive… his consciousness is beautiful, he’s aware of things at a high philosophical and spiritual level, and that comes out in his playing. When he plays you can be transported. He’s in great communication with his audience, so if they want to be taken some place amazing, and are ready for the ride, then Mike will take them there!

  Garson indeed recalls, in his early twenties, struggling from the library to the trunk of his car each time with armfuls of that sheet music. He would sight-read them all just once, then move on to others. He was reading music the same way that other people read books: it was a hobby for him. This trained his sight-reading abilities, which were already pronounced, but also allowed him to absorb a huge amount of music, from the sixteenth century onwards: Palestrina, Buxtehude, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Ravel, Debussy, Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Pärt, Messiaen, Ligeti. That vast grounding later became a rich source of inputs in his improvisation and composition, and informs his playing to this day.

  Ryan describes Garson as being happy to make use of keyboard technology where it is needed, but on the spectrum from technical keyboardist or programmer to pure pianist he leans toward the latter. When M-Audio developed the key bed of their keyboards to a point which brought it much closer to that of a real piano, though not quite, Garson interestingly reported that he would rather play a keyboard which was very different from the real thing, as he would more easily compensate accordingly, whereas if something initially seemed close to the real thing he may ignore or miss the subtle differences, and as a result his playing might suffer.

  Ryan describes Garson as ‘not just one of the greatest keyboardists on the planet but also one of the greatest jazz keyboardists on the planet’ and he believes that there has been a ‘miscarriage of justice’ in which Garson has been widely dismissed by the jazz community, simply because of his association and success with other genres of music and specifically because of his success in rock. Garson is almost certainly in the top ten jazz pianists in the world today. He has played with legends like Elvin Jones, Freddie Hubbard and Stan Getz.

  He went the Bowie route, and was making ten times more money than all the jazzers – and he could also play jazz better than them, as well as classical or rock. All they could do is say, he’s not one of us, he’s not in the club… When I hear who’s being invited to play out on the road, they don’t jump to ask Mike, they ask these other usual jazz suspects, they’re just missing the boat!

  He recalls a Keyboard magazine NAMM event which corralled the best keyboard players in various fields such as Joe Zawinul, Bruce Hornsby, Patrick Moraz and others, at which Ryan reflected that in his view Garson could ‘play circles around’ just about all of these in their respective styles, great as they were.

  The advances in music technology since Garson first played professionally in the 1960s have clearly transformed the possibilities for all of us, and he in particular has made full and extensive use of what has become possible, from automatically notating and scoring his ‘Now’ compositions, to sending the output from his recording sessions to clients across the world. But the advent of processes like sampling and sequencing has not been without its mishaps or ironies.

  He once played the Monterey Jazz Festival. At the time he was a Yamaha artist and was using a lot of equipment, so they had sent up various DX7 and other keyboards. Rather than bring in a trio, he was asked to programme the drums and an acoustic jazz bass, using one of their samplers, for his forty-minute set, to be performed in front of thousands. When the heavy velvet stage curtains parted to reveal his set-up, they knocked all of his keyboards off the very high stage. The piano was intact but all of the keyboards had gone and had to be quickly salvaged. Despite the metal of the units being bent, it all functioned okay. As for his performance, he had done a good job with all of the advance programming. He had played with so many excellent jazz musicians over the years that he instinctively knew what a good bassline and a good ride beat for the drums should sound like, and had programmed it realistically. A review in the following day’s newspaper complained that he had failed to acknowledge his rhythm section, and had kept them hidden behind the curtains.

  In 1990 he made a jazz album called The Mystery Man, which hardly sold (making it quite aptly named). It had an original piece of his called ‘Illumination’ featuring a great drummer called Billy Mintz, with whom he had played many times throughout his life. He had trouble, however, finding the right bass player, so he programmed it instead
using a sample sound from the 16W Yamaha sampler, and added some quantisation (which regularises the beat). As a little joke (best appreciated via an American accent), he credited the bass playing on the album cover to a certain ‘Sam Pull’. One of the magazine reviews a few months later, without any intended irony, said that ‘Sam’ was a great bass player, not much of a soloist, but very steady and dependable.

  Garson played a show with the Smashing Pumpkins in 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia, where Elton John has a home. He sat through the first set slightly off-stage, watching Garson play, virtually looking over his shoulder. Garson reminded him that they had met once before in a ‘crazy’ clothes store in Hollywood in 1972. Having seen the wild outfits worn by Bowie and the Spiders even at his audition, Garson had decided that he had better get something too. Elton asked if Garson was okay with him watching him play and Garson said it was fine. It was obviously a case of one pianist being keen and interested to watch another’s technique.

  Garson plays me a beautifully simple piano arrangement he has recorded of the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’, using the Ivory piano sampler. It is part of a collection of mp3s which he has made available for download, together with his musical arrangements for them as downloadable scores. He has also made forays into writing for string and wind instruments. He talks me through the modulations of Paganini’s Variations which he has rearranged for jazz cello, viola, violin and flute, to striking effect.