Errol Garner Plays Standards Original Recordings 1945-1949
The composer of 'Misty', Erroll Louis Garner, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 15June 1921 and although he never learned to read music in any formal sense, even in his youth he was already improvising and dabbling in composition. As a pianist he was largely self-taught; he first took up the instrument at three, while still a child he was heard on his local radio show Kan-D-Kids. During his ’teens he gained early experience and honed his already awesome technique in theatre shows and vaudeville and on riverboat gigs before establishing himself during the late 1930s in bands around Pittsburgh, notably Leroy Brown’s, during 1937. From his boyhood Erroll received significant peer encouragement from both his pianist brother
Linton and his schoolmate Billy Strayhorn, largely at whose instigation, in 1944, he transferred to New York.
In New York Down Beat magazine hailed him 'The only two-handed player since Fats Waller!', he met Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker (albeit he never was sucked into the burgeoning bop idiom, he later recorded with Parker, in Los Angeles, in 1947) and was heard in New York’s 52nd Street clubs, notably Tondelayo’s, where during part of 1944 he was in residence. That year he made his first recordings, semi-
private efforts made in the apartment of Danish jazz aficionado and promoter Baron Timme Rosenkranz and his wife (later reissued on LP by Bluenote) and also during 1944 Erroll formed a trio with John Simmons and Harold ‘Doc’ West and with this group made his first commercial recordings (issued on Atlantic, Musidisc and Rex, see Erroll Garner CD-1 Yesterdays, Naxos 8.120528).
