Jonny Trunk is a weird guy, or at least his tastes suggest a collector for the truly exotic. One look at his label’s web site, Trunk Records, and your snooping boss at work might fire you for looking at pornography on company time. He has an affinity to reissue soundtracks, particularly oddball jazz and porno flicks. Just in the last year, Trunk also put out the last record by the late free-jazz composer (and mostly unknown) Basil Kirchen, a compilation of British ad jingles, and a collection of folk oddities.
A crate digger in the most literal sense of the term, it’s easy to imagine him as the greasy dude that brought his own kneepads to the record fair to flick through vinyl with maximum comfort.
As the story goes, an LP by jazz pianist Michael Garrick caught Jonny Trunk’s eye one day in a London record shop and he found himself obsessed. The one record he could not find, however, was the Moonscape 10”, maddeningly pressed to a scant 99 copies in 1964. When he finally found a copy in 2003 (humorously given away by a friend of the man who originally pressed the record because he didn’t like jazz), it was shockingly unplayed and immediately digitally archived.
43 years later, we finally get to hear this stunning album in all its 22 minutes of obscure glory. Ah, yes, Moonscape is short, but oh my, is it beautiful. This is a time when “The New Thing” was actually still very new, still tickling the ears of inspiration and turning boppers into free-blowers and ushering in some of the most polarizing music the world had ever seen. From what I gather, instead of sticking to his bop roots, British pianist Michael Garrick was challenged and fascinated by the new approach to jazz. The reissue reproduces the original jacket of the LP with this introduction: “FREE FORM or THE NEW THING, as it is sometimes known, can be something of a leap into an abyss… We aim for a clean, integrated sound which, upon later examination, might be found to have meaningful shape and make musical sense” It sums up the recording perfectly: “free” enough to turn a few heads, but still accessible to the casual jazz listener.
As for the music itself, Garrick definitely takes some of his cues from Vince Guaraldi –steady, dramatic phrasing, a “blue” left hand, cascades that will break your heart. One thing to keep in mind with Garrick, though, is that he had spent most of his time writing jazz for poets. So beyond Guaraldi’s evocative imagery is Garrick’s evocative attention to poetic speech. His left hand may keep a calm rhythm, but his chords are tightly wound, nearly clustered to add an extra pang of sadness and definition to the backbone of a song like the slow-building “Sketches of Israel,” whose brief climax stops you cold.
On harder hitting cuts like the awesomely titled “Music for Shattering Supermarkets” and “Take-Off,” Garrick and his adept backing band, bassist Dave Green and drummer Colin Barnes (the former would go onto to play with Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, the latter became a tax inspector), really explore the far reaches of The New Thing. “Shattering” sticks to a hard swing a la Art Tatum, but it barrels forward with a wild intensity, Green’s bass fierce in the face of a drummer that can’t help but speed up. It’s not exactly “free” (unless you count Garrick’s severe disregard for his keyboard at the end), but it threatens like none other.
“Take-Off” begins meekly, much like the odd chords and chord progressions of the opening cut, but like its title suggests, the song mounds from ground zero, launches discordantly, and stumbles out of orbit. The bass rumbles and drums signal the sparks of the engine and the piano is the smoke ecstatically billowing in every direction. It’s a fascinating two minutes and 42 seconds, one that makes me wonder why Garrick’s never been mentioned stateside in the annals of great early free-jazz musicians.
Garrick still plays to this day and releases material on his own label, Jazz Academy. He’s best known in England for his jazz-choral works and teaches jazz at various institutions, including the prestigious Royal Academy of Music. I can only hope that the Moonscape reissue launches a whole campaign to really look at Garrick’s vast and virtually undocumented discography.
