Joyful virtuosity

Two of the 20th century’s greatest pianists were Erroll Garner and Glenn Gould. Garner absorbed every pre-bebop jazz piano style and synthesized it with inimitable, bebop-influenced virtuosity; Gould redefined classical virtuosity altogether, first with his crisp technique and second with his abandonment of the concert hall in favor of the superior acoustics and editing capacities of the recording studio.

Sony has just released repackaged highlights from each pianist’s career: The Complete Concert by the Sea (Legacy), a remastered, three-disc, 60th-anniversary edition of Garner’s best-selling album Concert by the Sea, and Glenn Gould Remastered: The Complete Columbia Album Collection (Sony Classical), a remastered, 81-disc box commemorating the 60th anniversary of Gould’s recording debut.

A steal at $200 (approximately $2.50 per disc), Glenn Gould Remastered suffers nevertheless from redundancy, following by only eight years the similarly comprehensive Glenn Gould: The Complete Original Jacket Collection. As if to acknowledge as much, Sony has also issued a 21-track highlights collection, The Sound of Glenn Gould. Yet it too feels superfluous, following by only six years Sony’s two-disc, 54-track The Essential Glenn Gould. It also makes Gould’s composer preferences seem a lot less adventurous than they actually were.

What The Sound has going for it (besides its $10 price tag) is a flow resulting from the kind of skillful editing of which Gould himself—as demonstrated by his 1972, self-edited Music from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five—was enamored. He was not, in other words, averse to the challenges of downsizing, even if the resulting juxtapositions required listeners to hear familiar compositions in new, potentially heterodox ways.

There’s no shortage of flow in Garner’s The Complete Concert by the Sea. Originally released in 1956 as an 11-track LP of Garner’s September 1955 performance in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., it quickly sold a million copies and thus carved itself into jazz’s Mount Rushmore. In deference to this legendary, if bowdlerized, version, The Complete includes it as Disc Three.

The unedited first and second discs, however, which restore 11 tracks and include on-the-spot interviews with Garner, Denzil Best (Garner’s drummer), and Eddie Calhoun (Garner’s bassist), will soon render the 1956 edition obsolete.

Like Gould, Garner was a wunderkind who could unerringly reproduce anything that he heard and enliven it with his own sensibility (and off-mic humming). Unlike Gould, Garner thrived on live performing. His concerts were exuberantly rollicking affairs that made living in the moment seem not only possible but also effortless. He never used sheet music (because he never learned to read it), seldom looked at the keys, and almost always smiled as his fingers worked fluent wonders.

The composers whose melodies he transformed during his seaside concert comprised a Great American Songbook Who’s Who: Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Rogers, George Shearing, George and Ira Gershwin, et al. The exclusion of Garner’s own soon-to-be-classic “Misty” notwithstanding, musical impeccability didn’t come any more impeccable. Or joyful.

About those composers. It’s worth noting, given today’s cultural climate, that they were white and that Garner (and his accompanists) were black—and that just nine days after Garner’s concert, the World Series in which Jackie Robinson’s Dodgers beat the Yankees began. The seeds of integration were being sown.

The agricultural metaphor fits, for what Garner was doing was not political but organic. Political weeds would eventually sprout. But the enduring popularity of The Concert by the Sea keeps alive the hope that what Garner sowed, or at least something like it, might yet someday be reaped.