New Music Tuesday – Pink Piano

Three discs today. Thinking about my grandpa lead to my realization that I own no Erroll Garner music, so now I have The Essence of Erroll Garner.

Erroll (yet another Pittsburgher!) never studied music, and never learned to read it. The opening track is my favorite at this time, Poor Butterfly. Probably because the percussiveness of his playing is so similar to what I recall hearing every night of my young childhood as my grandfather was at the keys until the wee hours of the morning. What perplexes me on this disc is the version of Misty. I have to do more research, but this simply cannot be the version that he made his name with. This version is overrun with schlocky strings, and the disconnect between the strings and what is going on with the keys sounds exactly as if someone recorded Erroll practicing while in the next room a radio was tuned to some Muzak station. It is a very, very strange recording, but sadly, not in the "so bad it's good category". It's just bad.

#2 is Marcus Roberts: Alone With Three Giants, which is a tribute to the works of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Jelly Roll Morton. I have been a Roberts fan for a long time, and I have really enjoyed this solo piano recording. The standouts at this point are Morton's Jungle Blues and Ellington's I Got It Bad.

And finally we have the original soundtrack recording to The Pink Panther by Cleveland native Henry Mancini. This is one of the first albums I remember having, although I know I did not purchase it. I am pretty sure that I appropriated it from my mother's collection. There are some great jazzy tracks on this CD, and really, if you listen to the Pink Panther theme, it is not as cheesy as you may think. I remember listening to the cartoon-y Shades of Sennett in my childhood bedroom, which remains outrageously wonderful. There are some bonus tracks on this CD from the later Panther films, and the “remix” theme is pretty great, too.