It
is easy to do the jazz dichotomy thing for Erroll Garner. He was nicknamed “The Elf,” but he had a
giant sound on the piano. During his
lifetime, he was one of the most visible jazz artists on television and in
concert halls, yet he has been largely overlooked by recent filmmakers
attempting to tell the jazz story (do the initials K.B. ring a bell?). For a documentarian, the latter point is a
golden opportunity. Atticus Brady
capitalizes on the wealth of archival footage and the admiration of friends and
colleagues the pianist-composer left as his legacy in the documentary-profile Erroll Garner: No One Can Hear You Read (trailer here), which releases
on DVD today from First Run Features.
In
the latter half of the Twentieth Century, if you had only one jazz LP in your
collection, it was probably Brubeck’s Time
Out, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue,
or Garner’s Concert by the Sea (all released
by Columbia, by the way). He was
enormously popular, playing venues like Carnegie Hall, paving the way for
Wynton Marsalis and the rise of curated jazz programming in the 1980’s.
Read nicely
establishes Garner’s remarkable success and his roots in the Pittsburgh jazz scene
that also produced Ahmad Jamal, Mary Lou Williams, and Stanley Turrentine.
However, with his very title, Brady emphasizes Garner’s status as perhaps the
last great ear-trained, non-music reading jazz greats. It is true, but it hardly seems like the
fundamental essence of the man. Indeed, Steve Allen argues Garner had a
remarkable harmonic sense and was woefully underappreciated as a composer. Of course, just about everyone knows at least
one Garner standard: “Misty,” the inspiration for countless romances and Clint
Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty
for Me (which happens to be screening this Friday and Saturday at the IFC Center).
Brady
talks to a number of colleagues and experts with both musical credibility and
name recognition, including Jamal, Allen, the other Allen (Woody), former
Garner sideman Ernest McCarty, and Dick Hyman.
More importantly, Brady has confidence in his subject, letting clips of
Garner in action play for considerable lengths of time. That is the good stuff, after all.
