** 2025 Stock ** Long before the large-scale suites, choral experiments, and orchestral epics, there was simply Michael Garrick at the piano, wrestling with songs in front of an audience. Gigs: Introducing Michael Garrick goes back to that essential scene, presenting a 10-track portrait of Garrick in trio mode that feels as close to the club floor as his discography allows. Originally issued in 2008 but drawing on earlier live and studio sessions, the album plays like a compact autobiography-in-miniature: familiar standards, personal favourites, and embryonic hints of the harmonic language that would later underpin his sacred and orchestral works.
The core of the record is the Garrick trio, with bass and drums providing a lean, breathing frame for the pianist’s mercurial imagination. While specific personnel listings vary across editions, the group follows the classic modern-jazz triangle: a bassist who sings through the instrument’s upper register yet keeps time grounded, and a drummer whose ride patterns and brushes are conversational rather than merely metronomic. Within that space, Garrick moves effortlessly between the tightrope poise of Bill Evans-like voicings, the rhythmic bite associated with early McCoy Tyner, and a distinctly English fondness for folkish, almost hymn-like thematic statements. Pieces such as “Peri’s Scope,” “Cottontail,” and “Turn Out the Stars” are less homages than laboratories, places where Garrick tests how far he can stretch each tune’s emotional frame without losing its recognisable silhouette.
What makes Gigs: Introducing Michael Garrick more than a historical curiosity is its sense of in-the-moment risk. Tempos lurch into double-time, ballads flirt with quiet collapse before being rescued by a well-placed chord, and standards are reharmonised on the fly, their inner voices nudged into new configurations. Garrick’s approach to time is elastic but never vague; he likes to lean ahead of the beat when agitated, then sit deep in the pocket when the trio hits a shared groove. The recording quality keeps the listener close enough to hear small details - pedal noises, off-mic mutters, the grain of the room - which only enhances the feeling of witnessing a working musician mid-evolution rather than a polished studio construct.
In the wider story of his career, the album functions as a kind of preface written after the fact. Listeners who know Garrick primarily through the grand canvases of Jazz Praises at St. Paul’s or Children of Time can hear, in these compact performances, the raw materials of that later vision: the way he threads hymn-like cadences into jazz harmony, his fascination with cyclic forms, his readiness to let solos become little moral dramas of doubt and release. For newcomers, Gigs: Introducing Michael Garrick offers an ideal first contact - one pianist, one small band, and a night’s work that quietly announces an artist determined to make the standard vocabulary speak with a strange, searching accent.
