Pianist and composer Mike Garson is perhaps best known for his longstanding musical relationship with David Bowie, which began in 1972. He made his mark...

Pianist and composer Mike Garson is perhaps best known for his longstanding musical relationship with David Bowie, which began in 1972. He made his mark on numerous Bowie albums and traveled thousands of miles on tours spanning more than four decades, including Bowie’s first and last performances in the U.S. When classical pianist Danny Holt first heard Mike Garson’s music, it was as if it reached out of his stereo speakers and grabbed him. Holt and Garson first crossed paths in 2004 when Holt was a graduate student at CalArts. The two hit it off, and Garson even helped produce Danny’s Fast Jump album, also released through innova. Garson and Holt developed a musical kinship, and that relationship led them to this album, Piano Music of Mike Garson. Mike Garson and Danny Holt share a voracious appetite for new music and monster piano technique. Garson developed a compositional process that favored first-take improvisational works composed in real-time with the help of a Yamaha Disklavier. Holt’s playing and Garson’s music both have a sense of immediacy, aliveness, and being ‘on the edge.’ All of this comes together to form a perfect pairing in this first-ever album of Mike Garson’s solo piano works, a project that survived both Garson’s home burning to the ground in a 2018 wildfire, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Danny Holt has been called “the classical music equivalent of an extreme sports athlete” (The Record) and Gramophone called his Fast Jump album (innova Recordings, 2009) “a compelling showcase for Holt’s innate virtuosity and gregarious temperament.” Known as a champion of adventurous new music, Holt has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Blue Man Group, Bang on a Can All-Stars, California EAR Unit, and the Calder Quartet, among others.

REVIEW:

Mike Garson may be best known for his extensive collaborations with David Bowie on disc and in concert, yet his credentials as pianist, composer, and arranger embrace a wide stylistic scope. You can’t really pinpoint his virtuosity within any genre, because he interweaves classical, jazz, and pop traditions organically and fluidly. What is more, he evolved a technique blurring improvisation and composition, where he would improvise fully-formed works, recording directly onto a Yamaha Disklavier, bypassing the notation process. He’d usually record at slightly slower tempos, and then use the Disklavier’s technology to play the pieces back faster. Over a period of about 10 years, Garson amassed around 3200 piano pieces this way, of which roughly one out of ten was a “keeper”.

Garson often takes his cue from preexisting pieces. The nearly eight-and-a-half-minute 3X18 uses Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit as a jumping off point, although some of the compound two-handed arpeggios border on Sorabji-like atonality. Homage to Chopin and Godowsky is a brilliant, freewheeling fantasia inspired by Godowsky’s transcription of Chopin’s C major Op. 10 No. 1 Etude, and may be more dazzlingly difficult to play.

Imagine a David Bowie ballad effortlessly merged with a Fauré Nocturne, and you’ve got Garson’s Nocturne in D-flat. Although the Hommage to Ligeti mirrors that composer’s restless rhythmic asymmetry and use of registers, the music’s rhapsodic lyrical qualities are pure Mike Garson. Actually, Garson’s Tribute to Keith Emerson sounds more authentically “Ligeti-like”, even though it’s superficially rooted in the opening of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus.

The point is that Garson’s magpie temperament and eclectic outreach never yields formulaic or clichéd results. There’s a consistent freshness to his inventiveness, and he rarely repeats himself. You can’t say that about many contemporary composers who write a lot for the piano.

Along with his brilliant technique, Danny Holt is able to imbue each composition with a distinct character. He gets exactly the right rhythmic feeling for jazz and pop oriented works, yet brings a wide dynamic range and sophisticated voicing to more complex selections. It would be interesting to hear Garson’s original Disklavier renditions of the 17 pieces selected for this release, yet one would miss the imprint of Holt’s own musicality and multi-leveled, even transcendent virtuosity. Holt provides detailed notes about the process of learning, assimilating, and recording this music under the composer’s supervision. A major and, needless to say, unique piano release, not to be missed.

-- ClassicsToday.com (10/10; Jed Distler)