Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  Mark Plati first worked with Bowie in 1996, first as a studio engineer but soon graduating into production of both live and recorded work. He also joined the band, playing bass and guitar on the ‘hours…’, Heathen and Reality albums, in addition to various keyboards and programming duties. Plati and Garson worked alongside one another on the Earthling album, the unreleased Toy album and also Live and Well, a live album made available exclusively through the David Bowie website, www.davidbowie.com. They played together at the Madison Square Garden show on 9 January 1997 to mark Bowie’s 50th birthday, and again later that year on the Earthling tour. In the latter part of 1999 Plati became Musical Director for Bowie’s touring band, which meant working with Garson again on the ‘hours…’ tour (1999), the 2000 Glastonbury mini-tour which included headlining the Glastonbury Festival as well as the BBC Radio Theatre performance, and the Heathen tour in 2002. There were also many television performances during this period. Plati reveals his first impressions of Garson:

  I first met Mike on one of the first tracking sessions for Earthling at Looking Glass Studios in New York… I recall Mike being set up in the Looking Glass control room with his Kurzweil piano, which had been specially flown in for him, along with Reeves Gabrels and Gail Ann Dorsey. Zach Alford’s drums were set up in the live room. We would then overdub like this, though usually one at a time, so we could concentrate on individual parts. I had already been working with Reeves for a time, so I was almost used to that level of musicality and sheer musical genius – he stole that thunder in a sense, and by the time Mike arrived I kind of expected everyone recording with Bowie to be a walking, talking musical phenomenon. Mike certainly didn’t disappoint in that regard – if anything he upped the ante, as his particular sensibility was more classical than Reeves while at the same time he was a monster improviser. Between Mike and Reeves it was like musical jousting, almost a contest – who could pull the most outrageous trick out of the musical hat, yet make it work. It was always exhilarating!

  He singles out Garson’s solo in ‘Battle for Britain (The Letter)’ from Earthling, which he calls ‘just perfect’ and recalls was inspired by Stravinsky. In fact, David Bowie specifically asked Garson to listen to Stravinsky’s ‘Octet’ in preparing that solo. Garson had studied Stravinsky in his youth, though had not heard it for some time. There was a Tower Records store just down from Looking Glass Studios at the time and Bowie suggested Garson pop down and pick up a copy. His usual method is to listen and absorb such prompts and then to ‘do his own thing’, though with that input in mind. On this occasion he says he found it an especially stimulating cue. He also recalls Bowie asking him to include part of a Vaughan Williams symphony as an introduction to one of the songs whilst touring during the 1990s, and remarks on Bowie’s eclectic taste and wide frame of reference: they were both keen, for example, on the music of Stan Kenton.48

  Plati says that Garson was a support for him on his first tour with Bowie, which was also his first experience of being musical director; he was missing his family and Garson could relate to that. Also, like Holly Palmer, he has a special memory of the shows on the ‘hours…’ tour and elsewhere in which they started the show with an acoustic version of ‘Life on Mars?’ performed only by Bowie and Garson. Garson would take to the stage first to play the familiar piano introduction, to great cheers and applause, after which Bowie would make his entrance, to even greater cheers and applause. Plati recalls being at the side of the stage ‘bidding adieu’ to Garson as he would walk out, essentially to open the show, and then hearing that wave of enthusiasm from the crowd as they recognised the opening bars.

  For Glastonbury, Earl Slick had rejoined the band and was playing with Garson for the first time since the 1970s. Plati was positioned between them on stage, and was struck that he was positioned now ‘right in the middle of the Diamond Dogs tour. Those guys were just doing their thing, and it was like no time had passed for them.’ Plati, like several others, also reminisces about the love of good food which Garson exhibited, recalling a visit to Milan during which Garson took him and Sterling Campbell to a small restaurant hidden away on a side street, a wonderful little family place, which Garson had remembered from a previous tour. There was also a large group meal in Paris when, asked what he wanted for dessert, ‘Mike simply swiped his finger down the list and ordered the entire dessert menu for us all!’

  Plati’s enduring impression of Garson was of someone who was always searching to top his previous efforts, that it was a constant musical adventure to see what he would pull out of the bag next. Some musicians reach a point of stability which they are happy to inhabit and work within indefinitely, and there is nothing wrong with that if it works for them. But it was fascinating to see someone of this calibre still constantly questioning, reaching out and experimenting.

  11 - Music in the moment

  ‘He’s a master piano player… he was the first person who probably introduced my young mind to the concept of atonality. Bowie’s music at the time in the ’70s was the first music I ever heard that I thought, “This is different, where did this come from?” ’49

  – Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins

  FOR SOME YEARS, GARSON’S PIANOS have been tuned by Samuel Ben-Horin, an exceptional man who used to tune for the Italian opera house La Scala for many years and then also for several top jazz musicians. Oscar Peterson even called him on to the stage to thank him at the end of a concert. Through his proximity to such musicians he has heard a vast amount of the very best in musical creativity, and offered me some telling insights into the distinctive qualities of Garson’s playing.

  I am very much impressed by Michael, as his ability to create is limitless in my view. He has no limits at all, he is so free in his invention. His creativity is so high. He does not wait for inspiration, he hears it, it’s under his fingers. He goes everywhere: one moment it can be Scriabin, the next moment something that no one has ever heard… it is inspired and absolutely limitless!

  As a young classical composer, Garson had started out using pencil on manuscript paper, but felt the results were mediocre, whereas through improvisation he could soar. Today he mainly uses the Disklavier, which is Yamaha’s modern version of the old player-piano, in order to create classical pieces via improvisation, and has established this as a specific new form called ‘Now’ Music. This is basically a more spontaneous and rapid form of classical composition, and as a way of creating new pieces of music it is no less valid or creative than handwritten scoring. With modern scoring software these creations are easily converted to printed sheets which others can then study, learn, practise or disseminate as well as perform. In many ways this is a natural step forward in musical evolution, brought about by rapidly advancing technology and what it can facilitate.

  This is just a small part of the wider history of cultural and artistic evolution, in which technical innovation has gone hand in hand with changes in the forms of output appropriate to that technology. Critics and purists protest that improvisation is not the same as composition but Garson responds that improvisation is just a very fast form of composition, and he seeks in his improvisations the balance that one finds in classical music.

  There is plenty of evidence that some of the most respected composers of the classical era also used improvisation. We may not be able to listen to recordings of Chopin or Liszt improvising, or see scores printed out digitally from their spontaneous performances; but the scores which they wrote out by hand did begin their life in some cases more on the keys than on the page. Improvisations, in the absence of any method of instant transcription, would be performed repeatedly until they started to congeal into a more consistent composition (and until their creator could memorise them well enough for them to have a specific identity). Those pieces which met with most favour when performed would be given special attention to the point at which they solidified into the ‘classics’ we celebrate today. In this sense the art of improvisation is actually more in keeping with the best tradi
tions of musical composition than is a mechanical devotion to the schematic construction of plans for a piece, in advance of its execution, or a genuflection to manuscript, paper and pencil.

  The most eminent scholar of the role of improvisation in classical music was Ernst Ferand, whose publication in 1938 of Die Improvisation in der Musik documented the use of improvisation in various periods of European history and was seminal, though largely ignored by a music establishment which had long forgotten the spontaneous methods of many of the great composers. Ferand, a Hungarian musicologist, further developed this theme and in 1961 edited and wrote the Preface to a book entitled Improvisation in Nine Centuries of Western Music: An Anthology. In a review published the following year it was stated that:

  The final act of composition – the act of setting down a new piece in written symbols – can easily make music motionless, sterile and null, especially if the composer looks on the performer as no more than a rather expensive and unwieldy gramophone whose sole duty is the unerring reproduction of the composer’s wishes. If composition can freeze, then improvisation must thaw. Capable at its best of making each performance new and spontaneous, improvisation has always been one of music’s finest defences against the chill of too much convention and the ice of too much intellect. For nearly a thousand years Western composers – which is to say notationers – have repeatedly tried to write down their sound-patterns in exact and unalterable symbols, only to find the warm breath of the performer just as repeatedly melting the finished design.50

  It is important to note with regard to this observation that in several prominent cases the composer and the performer were effectively one and the same person, so that such a process of notation through experimentation was taking place within the creative life of that individual. This would apply in particular to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Shubert, Chopin, Schumann and Liszt. And with the advent of recording technology in the twentieth century, we start to obtain fascinating insights into the interpretation and development of their own pieces by Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Shostakovich or Scriabin, all of whom can be heard performing their own creations.

  In 1974, Bruno Nettl contributed ‘Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach’ to The Musical Quarterly.51 This also confirms the validation of improvisation as a long-established method of composing, and is strongly reinforced by Dutch music professor, Willem Tanke. In recent years many scholars such as Dana Gooley at Brown University or Lynn M. Hooker at Indiana University have continued to focus on the importance of this thread in the creative process:

  Liszt also used his musical skills to endear himself to his audience: part of his recital arsenal was improvisation on tunes favored by or suggested by his audience, and during his 1839-1840 and 1846 tours of Hungary he used popular Hungarian repertoire in such improvisations. Some of these improvisations became the Magyar dallok and the Rhapsodies hongroises.52

  When choosing to improvise within a specified form, Garson enjoys the constraint of that structure, creating a sense of ‘infinite discipline with infinite freedom’. And the listener, too, seems to feel something satisfying about this combination of ‘wildness’ with structure. He says that someone like John Coltrane can even do amazing things over just one chord – melodic improvisation is even more of a challenge when there is only minimal guiding harmonic structure to work within.

  He explains that his ‘Now’ Music compositions often start from the challenge of improvising from zero but then progress into adding layers of harmonic progression which interrelate with the melody line. Just as the construction of a building requires foundations and underpinning to go deep into the ground, so the crafting of an improvised composition, whilst using spontaneity, can still benefit from a layer of harmonic progression on which to build. Then, against some simple chord changes, it becomes possible to build tension by straying further and further from the most expected melody, like the stretching of a rubber band, only to return finally to a resolution which is as dramatically satisfying as the preceding diversions may have been discordant. Such resolutions can be found of course throughout classical repertoire as well as jazz. Garson sees a thread of invention and indeed improvisation, running from

  Bach’s composing in a baroque style followed seventy years later by Mozart’s operating in a classical form and Chopin later still developing a romantic voice… two hundred years later, Philip Glass doing it with minimal music and repetition… and I say we know Bach and Chopin improvised. We have no records of it because there were no tape recorders or player-pianos.

  There is a revealing contrast between Garson’s many improvisational compositions and those he made earlier using more conventional techniques (of pencil and score rather than software for scoring more spontaneous creations). He says that these days he feels there is little difference in the outcome whether he writes something out longhand or whether he plays it in, as he knows what he wants to express either way; but twenty-five years ago, when he was more inclined to stick to traditional methods, his written pieces were less spontaneous and more ‘heavy’, which is something he is glad to have moved away from. At that time he was ‘trying to write sophisticated classical music that would be accepted by my peers’. He played a piece to Chick Corea in 1980 which he had written out by hand and Corea loved it, for its form and structure, but Garson felt it was too intellectualised. He wanted to find a way to surpass his own musical vocabularies and eventually started to do this by evolving his technique of improvising to the point where it was capable of creating bona fide pieces with spontaneous structure.

  There were three elements determining the emergence of his ‘Now’ Music. The first was purely physical. In his teens, as a dedicated pianist rather than composer, practising several hours a day (as well as doing some weightlifting), he developed severe wrist problems. He was told at one point that he would have to limit his practice to a couple of hours per day, unless he were to have surgery, which he was too fearful to pursue. At times he neglected to take this advice and ended up having to resort to ice-packs and anti-inflammatories to reduce the swelling. This motivated him towards composing; some of his improvised creations were extremely difficult to play and would have necessitated many hours of practice, which he was not in a position to do at that stage so he began to pass them on to other classical pianists to work on. In addition to the wrist pain, he was also becoming increasingly committed to the idea of creating something and then moving on each time. It became an integral part of his working method not to dwell but to create and then move forward to the next output, in order to ride the wave of his own creative flow.

  Through later years he found that from playing hard and long he would sometimes suffer from soreness, not in the tips but on the sides of his fingers, and acquired the habit of putting Band-Aid plasters around his fingers before performing. This has sometimes attracted more interest from shallow reviewers than his playing. He also comments that he should have had an endorsement deal as he has got through thousands of these, and the brand he prefers is not cheap. Sometimes he even has two or three around the thumb and the little finger. He comments with just a slight trace of humour that people may ask whether this might lead to him playing any wrong notes: ‘Well, occasionally, these minor second intervals get hit when they shouldn’t… but, you know, that only adds charm to my style which is a little dissonant anyway!’

  He also says that he is probably not hitting the keys perfectly, otherwise the sides of the fingers would not be so affected, but people develop their own way of playing and if it works it is best left alone. Whilst it is not ‘standard’, he says, neither is anything else he has done in relation to the piano. Yet he retains what he refers to as an obsession with the piano. Unlike others he was never really interested in experimenting with other instruments, orchestrating or arranging. Instead he has dedicated himself single-mindedly to making this instrument the tool of his creations, in conjunction with the simple notion which he sa
ys he was first taught by Lennie Tristano, that true jazz is playing what you hear in any moment.

  He says that second to this physical origin of ‘Now’ Music was the mental:

  Mentally, they came about – I tell people as a joke – because I don’t remember anything! I have to improvise these things, so I’d better get each one when it’s new. As you get older there’s some truth to that.

  The third element he refers to as the spiritual:

  If you’ve practised your whole life, it’s quite a gift and an honour if you can then sit down with all those languages of music… and use all that, express how you feel in the moment, using laws of music, rhythm, melody and harmony… When you’re in a relationship with another person you can always say, I feel tired today, I feel sick, I feel in love with you, I feel disgusted with you… you’re expressing how you feel and then the conversation might go from there. But with music, people have a gig, they have to prepare these things. Someone wants this, someone wants that, so you don’t always have that opportunity. So I’m trying to create that opportunity by saying, ‘Okay, this is what I’m feeling this minute’…

  In 2004 Garson was on the panel of judges for the Yamaha Young Performing Artist Award and selected the brilliant young composer-pianist Kris Becker as that year’s winner in the piano category. They did not meet at that point, but Becker explored the full range of Garson’s work (including his work with Bowie and other artists outside of classical music) in the following years, finding a great affinity with Garson’s whole approach to music. In 2011 he contacted Garson and they have remained in close contact since, with Becker recording a number of Garson’s compositions, and an album of these is planned for the near future. From their first meeting, Becker tells me, it was apparent that Garson was a ‘man of substance’ who combined ‘great knowledge and experience’ with humility and generosity, who was a natural teacher as well as constantly enquiring and seeking to learn as well as teach.