** 2025 Stock ** With Tone Poems, Michael Garrick brings his late-style orchestral vision to its most painterly extreme. Premiered in 2011, this 8-part suite for the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra renders each piece as an acoustic canvas, layering formal sophistication with vivid melodic storytelling. The album’s palette flickers between cinematic breadth (“Midsummer Departures,” “Songs of the Ainur”) and etching-like intimacy (“Limbo Child,” “October Woman”), blending mythological allusion and real-life memory in a structure that feels at once epic and miniature.
The ensemble - a full complement of reeds, brass, rhythm section, and occasional strings - gives Garrick’s writing space for stretching and compression, keeping the listener always on the edge of contrast: one movement washes the room in radiant ensemble sound, the next pares things back to a lonely solo line slipping through darkness. Solos bloom in context rather than isolation: a saxophone line arcs above a cluster of close-knit horns, a piano detail flickers deep in the harmony, a muted trumpet answers the orchestra with a phrase that lands like a question. Garrick’s orchestrational brush offers blues, chorale, and swing along with more rarified sound-painting that situates British jazz firmly inside broader European traditions.
Each “poem” matches theme to orchestration with real narrative drive. In “Shambolism,” bouncing ostinati hint at optimism tinged with irony; “Rustat’s Gravesong” sets meditative textures against subtle rhythmic dislocation; “Bladon” transforms a gentle folk tune into quietly surging ensemble peaks; “Floating on a Summer” resolves the suite with open, glowing harmony. Garrick’s mature harmonic language - restless but singable, moving between modal clarity and chromatic side-stepping - ensures the music never drifts into mere illustration. The orchestra’s multiple soloists respond in kind, bringing personal accents to every shade in Garrick’s sequence of musical portraits.
In the wider context of Garrick’s oeuvre, Tone Poems offers both culmination and contrast. Where earlier works tackled liturgy and myth directly, this album uses landscape, biography, and abstract imagination as hinges. The result is a sweeping album that feels faithful to tradition but unburdened by it; every theme and texture frames Garrick as painter and sonic architect alike, reminding listeners that jazz, for him, was always partly a visual art.
