Wow, what a contrast with last week. Whereas Tatum astonishes with technical wizardry, Erroll Garner shows that less can be more; Tatum bowls the listener over with an incessant acoustic assault, while Garner makes the silences work just as hard as the notes themselves. By far my favourite feature of Garner's playing is when he really unleashes that booming, thundering bass from his left hand (like in "How Could You Do a Thing Like That to Me"). It feels almost sacrilegious to say, but I far prefer Garner's approach: I will forever be in awe of what Tatum could do on the keys, but Garner strikes me as simply more musical in the end.

That we even have this album is a happy accident: per Wikipedia, there were no plans to record it, but Garner's manager spied a tape recorder running backstage (placed by an enterprising taper); that tape eventually became this album. It was an especially fortunate happenstance for Garner's label, Columbia—the notes for the 2015 rerelease claim that the album brought in over a million dollars in sales by 1958 (three years after the original release). Not bad for a record with an out-of-tune piano and barely audible backing instruments!

As is tradition around here, allow me to offer a connection in closing: early on, we met Art Blakey, along with his Messengers. Blakey's widely considered to be one of the greatest jazz drummers of all time, and to some extent he has Garner to thank for that: according to Blakey, he started his career gigging on the piano, but that ended abruptly one night when the club owner ordered him onto the drums instead. One gets the impression that Blakey perhaps wasn't entirely enthusiastic about the request at first—but when the club owner pulled his pistol on Blakey, Blakey had a sudden change of heart. For whom was Blakey vacating the piano bench? You've already guessed it, of course: Erroll Garner.

Favourite track: Mambo Carmel¹