Erroll Garner (1921–1977) was an African American pianist and composer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Erroll Garner was born on June 15, 1921, in the Hill District neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Garner began playing the piano at age three and quickly became accomplished at picking up tunes. At six he began taking lessons, but he never learned to read musical notation and always played by ear. Just a year later, he began to play regularly on Pittsburgh’s KDKA radio station with a group called the Candy Kids, and by the age of eleven he was playing on Allegheny riverboats.
Listening to early ragtime on 78 records, Garner developed his innovative style illustrated by steady left hand guitar style chord rhythms supporting loose, right-hand melodic interpretations and harmonic invention, a bit of Scott Joplin meeting Liberace, with a heaping dose of delight. “Humor is intrinsic to Garner’s nature and is a companion to his feeling for life, to the joy and sensuality of his playing,” wrote the late comedian and pianist Dudley Moore in a 1988 tribute.1
In 1939 Garner traveled to New York City as an accompanist for night club singer Ann Lewis and subbed for Art Tatum in Tatum’s trio with guitarist “Tiny” Grimes and bassist “Slam” Stewart. He played at the Melody Bar, Rendezvous, Three Deuces, and Jimmy’s Chicken Shack. In 1947, while playing in Los Angeles in his own trio with Red Callendar and Doc Wes, Garner met and recorded the hit “Cool Blues” with legendary saxophonist Charlie Parker. Garner continued his success as a prolific composer and recording artist, releasing his romantic version of “Laura” in 1946, which sold a half million copies, followed by the albums Cocktail Time in 1947 and The Elf in 1949.
An appearance on the Tonight Show, then hosted by fellow jazz pianist and composer Steve Allen, led to many more television requests. From the 1950s to the 1970s Garner appeared, often multiple times, on the Jackie Gleason Show, Ed Sullivan Show, Garry Moore Show, London Palladium Show, Andy Williams Show, Joey Bishop Show, Flip Wilson Show, Pearl Bailey Show, Mike Douglas Show, David Frost Show, Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall.
By the early 1950s Garner was one of the country’s most popular entertainers. Fortuitously, at this time he met Martha Glaser, who had originally planned to pursue a career in public affairs and journalism. However, following the 1943 Detroit riots, she became increasingly active in supporting human rights, taking a central role in the formation the Entertainment Committee to combat race hatred. The first Jewish American woman to be hired by the city of Chicago for the Human Rights commission, she organized jazz concerts, first working with Norman Granz and subsequently for agent and entrepreneur Joe Glaser, who managed Louis Armstrong. In 1948 Glaser created her own music publicity and management company.
In an era in which musicians were often exploited by their managers and women were not accepted beyond traditional professions of secretary, teaching, or nursing, Garner and Glaser formed a powerful and loyal partnership. In 1950 they founded their own publishing company, Octave Music, thereby ensuring greater royalties and control over Garner’s career. In the 1960s Octave successfully sued Columbia for unauthorized release of recorded material, a landmark case that had a lasting impact on the music industry. Their partnership lasted until Garner’s death in 1977. Glaser continued to manage Garner’s catalog and licensing until her passing in 2014, most notably taking documentarian Ken Burns to task for his omission of Garner from his documentary film Jazz in 2001.2
In 1950 Garner played a historic solo recital at the revered Cleveland Music Hall, traditionally a venue for classical concerts, and later that year gave a concert at New York’s Town Hall. Recitals and recording sessions gradually replaced his club performances. Body and Soul was released in 1952, Too Marvelous for Words and Other Voices in 1954, and Paris Impressions in 1958. In 1958 Garner became the first and only jazz artist to perform under classical impresario Sol Hurok after World War II. Frequently seen playing on TV in the 1950s and 1960s, Garner’s unique style drew both fans and imitators. Fellow Pittsburgh native Art Blakey originally took up the piano until Garner outclassed him one night and the owner of the club suggested Blakey try the drums, which he did.
Garner continued to record in the 1960s and 1970s, releasing Feeling Is Believing in 1969 and Erroll Garner Plays Gershwin and Kern in 1976. In 1963 he scored the movie A New Kind Of Love, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. In 1968 he appeared on Danish TV with bassist Ike Isaacs, drummer Jimmie Smith, and bongo player Jose Mangual for a taped appearance that was made into the documentary Erroll Garner in Copenhagen.
Garner was diagnosed with lung cancer at the peak of his career. On January 2, 1977, he passed away at just 55. Buried at Homewood Cemetery in Pittsburgh, he leaves behind a rich legacy of music that is still enjoyed today. After his death, previously unreleased recordings were issued, beginning with Easy to Love in 1988 and Dancing on the Ceiling in 1989, and many of his albums have been remastered and reissued.
Although he wrote more than 200 original compositions and recorded numerous albums, Garner is best known for one composition, “Misty,” and one album, Concert By The Sea, both of which are considered classics today. “Misty” ranks number twelve on ASCAP’s list of most-performed songs of the twentieth century, where it joins standards such as “White Christmas,” “Over the Rainbow,” and “As Time Goes By.” Since 1954 no other song has been recorded by more jazz artists except for Duke Ellington's “Satin Doll.” In 1991 Garner's version of “Misty” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2002 Johnny Mathis’s recorded rendition of the song was also inducted. In 1995 Garner was chosen as a subject for the US Post Office stamp series, along with fellow jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, James P. Johnson, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and Jelly Roll Morton.
“Misty” first appeared in 1954 as an instrumental track on Garner’s album Contrasts, which reached number 30 on the pop charts. However, Glaser and Garner hounded several Tin Pan Alley lyricists to write lyrics and Johnny Burke responded. In 1959 Johnny Mathis recorded it on his album Heavenly, and the song peaked at number 12 on the US Pop Singles chart, reaching 2.5 million US sales and becoming one of Mathis’s signature songs.
The lush ballad pervaded popular culture. It has been featured in numerous television shows, such as Cheers, Saturday Night Live, Magnum PI, and The Muppet Show, as well as films, including Silver Linings Playbook. Throughout most of the 1960s, fans started their day to “Misty,” which was used as the theme of the Today Show. In 1971 it was the centerpiece of Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty For Me, for which Garner was paid $25,000 to license the song. The film starred Eastwood as a late-night disk jockey who has a fling with one of his listeners. Spurned, she stalks him by calling in requests every night, saying, “Play ‘Misty’ for me.”
“Misty” has been recorded many times, most notably by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Andy Williams, Julie London, and Frank Sinatra. In 1962 Stan Kenton recorded it on his album Adventures In Jazz. Ray Stevens recorded a country version, which rose to number 3 on the US Billboard Hot Country Singles, and in 1975 Stevens won a Grammy for his country arrangement of the song.
On September 19, 1955, Garner’s trio was hired by disk jockey Jimmy Lyons to play in a converted church at the Fort Ord military base in Carmel, California. There were no plans to make a recording, but Glaser saw that jazz fan Will Thornbury brought a tape recorder to capture the event for himself and fellow servicemen. She told him, “I'll give you copies of every record Erroll ever made, but I can't let you keep that tape.”3 Glaser took the tape and brought it back to New York, where she played it for George Avakian, the head of Columbia Records jazz division. The recording would become one of Columbia Records’ best-selling albums of the decade. It featured “I’ll Remember April,” “Teach Me Tonight,” “Autumn Leaves,” and “Mambo Carmel-by-the-sea.”
Although the album’s sound is less than perfect—the performances of bassist Eddie Calhoun and drummer Denzil Best are faint—and although the piano is slightly out of tune, the recording captured the essence of Garner’s improvisational skills, becoming the top-selling record in Garner’s career and one of the most popular jazz albums of all time. Music critic Will Friedwald writes, “It’s not hard to hear why: from the first notes onward, Garner plays like a man inspired—on fire, even. He always played with a combination of wit, imagination, amazing technical skill and sheer joy far beyond nearly all of his fellow pianists, but on this particular night he reached a level exceeding his usual Olympian standard.”4
In September 2015 Octave Music and SONY Legacy released a new and updated version of Concert by The Sea. This three-CD box set contains the complete live concert recording, including eleven previously unreleased tracks, the original edited Columbia release from 1956 (digitally restored and remastered at The Magic Shop using the Plangent Process) and bonus material including announcer Jimmy Lyons and interviews with the Erroll Garner Trio (Denzil DaCosta Best, Eddie Calhoun, and Garner himself), recorded directly after the concert.
This is a collaboration between the Center for American Music, Theodore M. Finney Music Library, and Archives & Special Collections.