Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  Well, Mike’s playing is an undeniable signature sound to many of Bowie’s records, along with Mick Ronson’s guitar playing. Those two emerged as icons in Bowie’s various bands. The Aladdin Sane piano parts are exquisitely beautiful. I think fans of Bowie are also fans of Mike, they ‘get’ him. When they worked together they had a great symbiotic interactive relationship. As a producer I always jumped in with my suggestions, but when I saw that David and Mike were on a roll of creativity I would just step aside and assist them in any way I could. They worked together really well… I think David regards him very highly.

  4 - Brooklyn, 1945-1969

  ‘I look into his sincere, green eyes and I ask him to do something, and he nods… and then does whatever the fuck he wants.’

  – Producer, Tony Visconti

  GARSON WAS BORN AND GREW UP in Brooklyn, a borough of the city of New York which has produced a hugely disproportionate number of stars of music and the arts, including Lou Reed, Neil Diamond, Jay-Z, Mel Brooks, Spike Lee, Harry Nilsson, Aaron Copland, Neil Sedaka, Tony Visconti, Barbra Streisand, Larry David and Larry King (who attended the same school as Garson). The Garsons were a Jewish family, living in one of the most cosmopolitan conurbations in the world. Brooklyn in particular was always a vibrant area with a great mix of different ethnic backgrounds.

  His father, Bernard, was a liquor salesman, delivering alcohol to locations in New York including the Half Note jazz club. One of the regular performers at the Half Note was Lennie Tristano, who became Garson’s piano teacher. Tristano was blind and something of a jazz legend. He played with Charlie Parker, but was also a prodigious teacher. Tristano was the only jazz musician in New York at that time who gave lessons and really knew how to teach jazz. The other big names on the jazz scene just did not talk about their music in those days, so you could only learn from them by imitation. Tristano was a great player but also had a system, a formula, and would set exercises for each student to work on before the next lesson. He also had a very particular playing style which Garson can imitate easily to this day. Hordes of young jazz fans queued to see him. Garson describes how Tristano would teach as many as eighty students across Mondays and Tuesdays, for just ten minutes each, and the young Garson travelled two hours each way from Brooklyn for these lessons.

  His father wanted him to be the next Gershwin. Brooklyn was also where George Gershwin grew up; he died a few years before Garson was born. He feels a strong connection with Gershwin, and ‘not just because our names both start with G and end with N!’ He plays a sensitive tribute, ‘A Gershwin Fantasia’ which is available for example on his Mike Garson’s Jazz Hat album, and is an improvised medley based around Gershwin’s themes. Garson believes there was a special inspiration in Brooklyn.

  The post-war years saw a decline in the economy of Brooklyn, with heavy manufacturing moving out to cheaper areas and even the ports slowly becoming less active, since the larger container ships now dominating the shipping trade needed deeper harbours. It was also long before the later periods of gentrification with the various waves of hipster cool and artists’ colonies over in districts like Williamsburg. Still, it was lively and ethnically mixed and despite widespread poverty always had more than its share of vibrant local pride.

  Growing up in the 1950s, the family lived in a small apartment on Ocean Parkway in the Flatbush district of Brooklyn, between Prospect Park and Coney Island, on the second floor of a six-storey building, with an elevator. Ocean Parkway was built in the 1870s and inspired by the grand boulevards of Paris and Berlin. They would have been considered as a fairly ‘middle class’ family. He has a sister, Barbara, ten years older, who became a model and also gained a psychology doctorate, specialising in biofeedback. She married young, at about eighteen, to Sheldon who owned a building on Park Avenue in Manhattan. They did very well in real estate and retired to the beautiful town of Sedona, Arizona, with its striking red sandstone cliffs, where Garson has performed a number of times, and his sister and her husband have been very supportive of his career.

  From the time he started piano lessons, aged seven, his father would sit in a big comfortable chair a few feet from the piano, listening and offering corrections and suggestions, whilst smoking ‘big, fat cigars’ of which he would get through ‘eighteen per day’. The smoke was so thick that he now recalls that he literally could not see his father across the room, as if there were ‘a fog machine’. At the time, he says, this is how people lived and thought nothing of it, but as he now looks back sixty years it strikes him as bizarre and hilarious that their small Brooklyn living room was dominated permanently by this cloud of strong-smelling smoke. He is, however, grateful for his father’s attitude towards his music throughout those early years. Right from the start he was his biggest supporter and inspiration, never once saying ‘you have to teach to make a living’ as others did, but simply ‘just go do your music’. He had a natural and instinctive musicality and, though untrained, was able to guide his son’s playing towards being ‘in the zone’ or ‘in the pocket’, as Garson puts it, and taught him some quite complex imitations he had worked out of the music he heard on the early Westerns. He had learned to play some classical pieces by ear too, but this ‘cowboy film’ music was ‘the one thing he had composed’.

  It is interesting that Garson recognises his father’s improvised creation as a fully fledged composition, in much the same way that his own compositions are now produced, in contrast to the élitism of the classical establishment which generally only labels as composition those pieces which are laboriously scored by hand, note by note. Garson’s father played the melody of his composition in octaves with his left hand, with chords in the right hand. He imitated this style of playing from the pianists who had performed in the early movie theatres, providing their live improvised scores to silent films. His son can still play to this day an example of this ‘cowboy’ music his father showed him in the 1950s.

  Garson describes his father as a great man, who was ‘very psychic’ and knew that his son was meant to do music. His mother, Sally, was ‘a wonderful lady, she loved my music and loved me playing’. She had hoped he might pursue a medical career but when he switched to music at college she was supportive, and came to many of his concerts, including at Madison Square Garden with David Bowie. When she died she knew he was set and well established in his career.

  Garson’s father-in-law, Bernard Taylor, on the other hand, continued to see his music as just a ‘hobby’ and hoped that he would get a ‘real job’ right up to when he reached fifty, even making an attempt to get him back into medical school when he was already forty-three. He owned a Manhattan trucking company, and was leaned on by the Mafia for payments in order to survive and trade in that business. This was a very different world from Garson’s, and yet he was keen for Garson to take over his business – which raises the now slightly bizarre image of Mike Garson supplying road transport rather than musical expertise.

  Bernie Taylor provided the line for an ongoing family joke. They were once all at a wedding, and the rather mediocre but large band was filling the bandstand. Confusing quality with quantity, he turned to his son-in-law and said, ‘Look Michael, now that’s a band! They have about twelve people up there! That’s what you need, you only have three…’ For years afterwards, whenever Garson was due to play with a larger ensemble, he and Susan would joke that he was in luck as it was going to be such a ‘good sized’ band.

  There was a piano in his house growing up, as he estimates there would have been in about seventy per cent of Jewish homes in Brooklyn at that time, with maybe one in four children learning to play. He jokes that if you were a Jewish child in 1950s Brooklyn who did not like music then ‘you were doomed’ as it was so common within that community to have music lessons. Whereas his father played by ear, his mother and sister played from sheet music. His sister reached quite a high standard, as had his mother.

  His father was born in 1906 and went out to California in his twenties to become an
actor. He got some extras work, but returned to New York and got a job with Standard Wine and Liquor, selling whiskey to the bars. He was not the last Garson to move to California, and in 1978 his son and daughter-in-law themselves moved from Long Island to Los Angeles, where Mike Garson would work with Stanley Clarke and Susan was going to be managing Chick Corea. They have been settled for some years in the remote community of Bell Canyon, in Ventura County. With a population of only 2,000, there is a disproportionate number of celebrated musicians and actors attracted there by its seclusion and security. Bell Canyon is an equestrian community and indeed it is a former horse barn which has been converted into his home studio complex beside his house.

  His mother had wanted him to be a doctor ‘like all Jewish mothers’, he says, but he failed at biology during his ‘pre-med’ major as a student and appealed to the teacher:

  I said to the biology teacher to come to the window – I said, look at the building over there – that’s the music building. If you let me out of here and give me a ‘D’, I’ll never look back, and I’ll go and do my music, and you won’t have me in your hair. Dissecting this pig, and making ‘spare ribs and chopped liver’ from this poor foetal pig that I was learning to dissect. Then he laughed, and he said, ‘Get outta here’! And he gave me a ‘D’. If I’d had an ‘F’ I would have had to redo the course…

  He had started piano lessons at seven. At the time it seemed young but he now knows from seeing the talent in two of his young grandchildren, Max and Jacob, who in recent years were living with him, that the young brain can absorb so much (Max started playing the drums at the age of two).

  Garson recalls one concert at elementary school, aged seven, in which he was to play a piece (‘Long, Long Ago’ by T. H. Bayly) which had a first section, which would lead into a link for repeating that section, and then the second time round it would go on to an ending. He got stuck in a loop, however, in which he kept playing the link into the repeat, so that he sat there repeating the first section over and over, whilst all the young children in rows sat and stared. Eventually, after ten minutes, two teachers had to walk over, lift up the piano stool with him on it, and move it away from the piano.

  In those days the teacher would visit the home. Most of the children would give up after a while. The Garsons had a telephone in a little closet in the kitchen where they hung their coats. He did not want to practise for any more than about twenty minutes a day, and has vivid memories of his mother threatening to cancel the lessons if he did not practise. But each time he saw her move towards the closet with the telephone in it to do so, he would run back to the piano and start practising. This went on for five years. I can relate absolutely to this story as I had exactly the same experience. Not wanting to stop the lessons or the chance to play, which is soon seen as a source of great enjoyment, whilst at the same time finding it tedious and boring to have to practise.

  Our social environment clearly plays a key role in determining which children around the world are to become the pianists of tomorrow. Garson asks, ‘Would I have chosen it, if there was no piano and my sister and my mother didn’t play the piano? They were both trained at the piano… it was almost like it unfolded, this piano thing.’ His mother and sister continued to play a little, but they decided to focus their efforts mainly on training young Michael, who had the ‘gift of the ear’, with perfect pitch and also imaginative creativity, whilst his mother and sister were good at reading music and playing classical music elegantly.

  His father was utterly devoted to Garson’s playing. A few years before he died, he was poorly, he had lost his wife, he was sick and grouchy, ‘complaining that he could not get around the corner to get a sandwich’, when his son phoned from California and mentioned that he was playing in Montreal the following night. ‘I’ll be there!’ said his father. And he was.

  In the 1980s he played an outdoor concert in Phoenix, Arizona with Doc Severinsen, the trumpet player who led the band on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson for many years, and was the principal pops conductor for several big American orchestras. His father flew over two thousand miles from Brooklyn for that occasion. He sent a dedication with a bottle of champagne, with tray, glasses, and a handsome tip for the waiter, up to the stage for Doc Severinsen, with a note saying ‘That’s my son on stage with you!’

  Garson now believes that his best teacher was his first, when he was seven, Mr Scatura. This man was not the best player or the most knowledgeable but was ‘the warmest Italian man’. Any mistake was punished with a gentle tap with two fingers, but ‘it was done with so much love’. In those days to encourage a rounded position for the hand they would put a little apple under your hand to remind you that it should not be flat. At the end of each lesson he would play Garson a piece by Chopin or Rachmaninoff, which was an inspiration and the best part of the lesson.

  At the age of about ten it seemed right to move on to a more advanced teacher, but he is sorry now that he could not stay longer with this sweet man whose humour, care and enthusiasm radiated from his face into the young Garson. He has tended to talk more about the better-qualified teachers who came later, but now he sees that it is really all about the inspiration which, from the right teacher, can come in a split second and last for a lifetime. In that second, your path is plotted and you are hooked.

  He moved on to lessons with a neighbour, Leonard Eisner, who came from the Juilliard School. He still carries the painful memory of how Eisner dismissively accused him of having ‘delusions of grandeur’ because at twelve years old, rather than play the written notes of Mozart or Chopin, he was improvising over them. This was an early taste of proscriptive negativity from the musical establishment, which is a recurring theme in Garson’s life. This teacher was hugely looked up to by the young student, and could easily have couched this in a much more positive light, offering encouragement rather than criticism of this early sign of promise in Garson as composer and improviser. He still recalls how when he ‘altered Mozart’s Sonata in A Major, K331, Eisner had a “mental breakdown” and I knew it was all over with him!’ Garson moved on to his next teacher, Lee Sevush from Sheepshead Bay, who ‘opened up the doors to commercial music and some jazz, some Latin music such as Carmen Cavallaro… he prepared me for the Catskills’.

  Garson had intended to become a rabbi, up until the age of fourteen. He scored one hundred per cent in a Hebrew exam and won a trip to Israel on a scholarship. He played Rhapsody in Blue on the ship going over there, and still recalls how seasick he felt, as the piano slid across the floor whilst he played, so rough was the crossing from Marseilles to Tel Aviv:

  I was playing these runs and arpeggios, and the piano would be going in one direction, and I was going in another direction! Everything was swaying, I ended up being sick for days. But I managed to finish the piece… though that was at a young age and it was pretty scary. It’s good to know that I’m still doing the Gershwin stuff, fifty-five years later.

  At that time he was still playing Rhapsody in Blue exactly as it was written, though within a few years he had started to extemporise profusely from such pieces and later created his Gershwin Fantasia. He stayed on a kibbutz for a month and studied.

  There were a lot of Italians in his school in Brooklyn, and languages taught also included Spanish and French. Later, at college, he also tried Italian, but did not take to it. He was unusual in continuing his Hebrew studies beyond his Bar Mitzvah at thirteen, and still recalls how devastated his Hebrew teacher, Mrs Mandelbaum, was when he later told her that he was going to shelve his Hebrew studies in favour of taking up music. The rabbinate’s loss was music’s gain. Yet he still feels that even if he were a rabbi or a doctor, his identity and his intentions would be the same as those he holds dear as a musician: to help others and to communicate.

  Although the popular music of his youth was swing and bebop, and then rock and roll, the music he heard at home was mainly classical. His mother was suspicious of jazz, associating it with New Orleans strip clubs an
d brothels. He recalls being taken by his father to Coney Island, fishing and getting hot dogs and fries. As a young child he saw the arrival of television in the home, with such shows as I Love Lucy and stars like Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Jackie Gleason and Steve Allen. Allen wrote many thousands of pop and jazz songs, was a good pianist and also wrote many books. He was the first presenter of The Tonight Show (in 1954), which was later associated with Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and then Jay Leno followed by Jimmy Fallon.

  Jack Paar had a musical director called José Melis, a brilliant Cuban pianist from whom Garson says he took some of his own schtick. For example, on the show each night they would ask an audience member for the last four digits of their telephone number, and Melis would then go to the piano, count that number of notes up or down and make up a song on the spot using those notes. Garson does something similar, asking audiences to choose notes on which he bases the next improvisation, sometimes even letting them help to determine how an improvised piece should end. This has very exciting implications in terms of the group dynamic and the feeling of commonality which builds within an audience, as well as between audience and performer, going right back to our discussion of more ancient forms in which music was a communal, spontaneous ritual or celebration, without division between performer and audience.

  One big influence on the young Garson was Roger Williams, who made ‘Autumn Leaves’ famous in 1956 with his big hit instrumental version, with its great chromatic runs in thirds which Garson today still imitates in his own live versions of the song, as his tribute to Williams, much to the delight of audiences. They became friends many years later, and it transpired that they had both been taught by Lennie Tristano. Then there was Peter Nero, a conductor who was also a good jazz pianist, with a tinge of pop sensibility; and of course André Previn.