Erroll Garner - In Performance
Pianist Erroll Garner's sheer ebullience, virtuoso technique, and endless flow of ideas are all on hand in these two 1964 performances (totaling 72 minutes) taken from the archives of the BBC. Although players like Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner were moving jazz piano in entirely new directions by that time, Garner's jaunty, florid playing, with its elements of ragtime, stride, and other old-fashioned styles, seems to exist in another world. It's an entertaining world, though, as he makes his way through a repertoire consisting largely of standards like "Just One of Those Things," "Laura," "Lover," "Honeysuckle Rose," and such, most of them featuring Garner's inimitably imaginative introductions. However, although he wrote the tune, hewon'tplay "Misty" for you; that classic appears here only as an audio-only bonus track, an inexplicable move roughly akin to Tony Bennett not singing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" or Tiny Tim foregoing "Tiptoe Through the Tulips."--Sam Graham