** 2025 Stock ** Yet Another Spring finds Michael Garrick at late-career full stretch, writing not just for a band but for an entire emotional climate. Conceived for the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra and released in 2006, the hour-long album unfolds as an eleven-part suite that traces a human arc from first breath to final absolution. Garrick’s long preoccupation with sacred forms resurfaces here, but instead of overlaying jazz on ready-made liturgy, he builds his own: a sequence in which “Aria” opens the curtain, “Birth Baptism” introduces a fragile new presence, and the title track returns, refracted, as a meditation on continuity. The music is explicitly programmatic without slipping into mere illustration; every modulation and tempo shift feels tethered to some inner weather of conscience or memory.
The orchestra Garrick convenes is a cross-section of British jazz craft and character. Saxophones and brass move like a single, many-headed organism, capable of both Ellingtonian warmth and sharp, modernist angles. The rhythm section supports with a mixture of swing, rubato episodes, and folk-tinged cadences, giving Garrick’s piano space to pivot between chorale-like simplicity and knotty, questioning harmony. At crucial junctures, Norma Winstone’s voice enters not as ornamental colour but as narrator and witness, sometimes singing text, sometimes dissolving into wordless, aerial lines that hover above the band like memory itself. Garrick’s orchestrations let these elements breathe: he frequently pares the ensemble back to small-group textures before unleashing full-ensemble tuttis that feel like sudden floods of daylight.
What gives Yet Another Spring its particular gravity is the way it treats the idea of “another” spring not as bland optimism, but as something edged with doubt. Garrick writes radiant themes yet constantly subjects them to variation, reharmonisation, and interruption, as if asking whether renewal can ever be uncomplicated. Joyous, dance-like passages are shadowed by darker harmonies; serene chorales morph into turbulent ensemble passages; motifs return in altered states, like faces revisited across decades. The result is a piece that hears the life cycle through the lens of a restless believer: grateful, questioning, unwilling to separate beauty from unease. For listeners tracing Garrick’s journey from earlier choral works to the vast canvases of his later years, Yet Another Spring feels like a culminating statement - a big-band requiem for the passing of time that still, somehow, leaves the door open to light.
