** 2025 Stock ** With Inspirations, Michael Garrick trades the cathedral-scale sweep of his large ensembles for something more intimate and quietly radical. Recorded in 2006 with the New Quartet he had been refining since 2001, the album captures a veteran composer-pianist turning his attention to the microscopic details of line, touch, and interplay. Instead of grand thematic suites or choral architecture, Garrick lets small gestures carry big meanings: a left-hand voicing that slightly shifts the harmony’s emotional weight, a delayed cymbal accent that makes a phrase breathe differently, a saxophone inflection that reframes the entire mood. The record is explicitly conceived as a celebration of John Coltrane’s spirit, yet what emerges is less tribute than transmutation, absorbing Coltrane’s sense of quest into a distinctly British lyricism.
The New Quartet is central to this alchemy. Martin Hathaway’s saxophones bring a cool, tensile focus, favouring long, sculpted lines over overt displays of fire. Paul Moylan’s bass anchors the music with warm, singing tone and melodic counter-lines that often feel like a second voice rather than mere support. Alan Jackson’s drumming is all about implication: feathery ride patterns, offbeat snare murmurs, and sudden splashes of colour that tilt the music into new perspectives without crowding it. Against this framework, Garrick’s piano moves between crystalline folk-like themes and harmonically adventurous detours, hinting at hymn tunes one moment and knotty modernism the next. Pieces such as “Floating on Summer” and “Song Before Sunset” (titles that suggest both weather and mood) embody this balance, juxtaposing relaxed melodic surfaces with restless harmonic undercurrents.
What keeps Inspirations from becoming a nostalgic late-career comfort record is its active sense of inquiry. Garrick uses the quartet format to ask how intensity can exist at low volume, how spiritual jazz can whisper instead of roar. The Coltrane connection surfaces less in obvious references than in the underlying architecture: cyclical forms that gradually heat up, bass figures that hint at pedal-point trances, and solos that build in waves rather than straight lines. Yet the sound-world remains resolutely Garrick’s - dryly British in its understatement, fond of wry rhythmic nudges and subtly altered cadences. Even the more playful titles, such as “Oyster in the Cloister” or “In a Singy-Songy Kind of a Way,” conceal serious compositional craft beneath their whimsy, folding complex phrase structures into disarmingly singable tunes.
As a chapter in Garrick’s discography, Inspirations reads like a late confession: a chance to revisit lifelong devotions - to Coltrane, to song form, to the marriage of faith and improvisation - within the close quarters of a road-tested band. For listeners, it offers an unusually clear view of his priorities stripped of spectacle: melody as moral compass, ensemble chemistry as philosophy in action, and the conviction that, even in a modest studio setting, jazz can still be a form of prayer.
