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CROSSING TOWN TO SEE MICHAEL GARRICK

I almost missed a recent performance by Michael Garrick, a British jazz legend. His gig was on the complete opposite side of London from where I live, and the two tube rides, bus ride and walking required to get me there was not encouraging. It was also a particularly cold night in ol’ Blighty and the warm couch beckoned. But missing Garrick would have been a big mistake.

Having reared myself on mostly American jazz artists, Garrick was a new name for me. A self-taught pianist and composer born in 1933, he is sometimes referred to as the “British Ellington.” But the fluid, graceful and exploratory way he played those keys reminded me more of Bill Evans, mixed with the playfulness of Thelonious Monk. At one point he even reached inside the opened piano and played by plucking and tapping at strings. He’d laugh or shout out when a band member did something he liked. He seemed to enjoy choosing precisely how to end each piano solo as he did starting each one up. DJ Gilles Peterson (whose compilations turned me onto Garrick) said once that Garrick and other British jazz artists from the 1960s did "live the jazz life… They presented a belief in the movement." This show was testimony to that.

Garrick’s quartet was situated on a small stage in the back room of a pub in a sleepy, south-west nook of London, just over the Barnes Bridge. Turn-out was thin and inauspicious: only six people ended up shaking off the day's soggy stupour to see them perform. But what was surely sad news for the band was charming for the rest of us; we got treated to an intimate concert of a guy in love with jazz doing his thing.

On this particular night, the band ripped through fast sections and down-shifted into ballads, both Garrick originals and some standards, such as Bill Evans’ “Peri’s Scope”. Some guy in the audience kept blurting out fairly typical, benign requests like “So What”, and “One Note Samba”, but Garrick did his best to satisfy (there were so few of us, after all). Instead of “One Note Samba,” the band broke into Jobim’s “Girl From Ipanema”. But they actually turned the staple of elevator music into an adventure by toying with unexpected harmonies and churning out revved-up solos. It was the most fun I’ve ever had listening to that song. And judging by the big grin on Garrick’s face, it was for him too.

His newest album, “Introducing Mick Garrick”, came out just last month on New Note/Pinnacle. ~ GARY MOSKOWITZ