Michael Garrick obituary

Peter Vacher
The Guardian, Tuesday 15 November 2011 13.52 GMT

Photograph: Sisi Burn/Arena/PAL

Often capricious, frequently didactic, yet invariably passionate about his music, the jazz pianist and composer Mike Garrick, who has died aged 78 following a heart operation, was at the forefront of British modern jazz from the 1960s to the present. Creatively restless, Garrick allied himself to jazz innovators such as the Jamaican altoist Joe Harriott and to poets with a penchant for jazz, while also building a considerable repertoire of extended orchestral pieces and acting as a tireless proselytiser for jazz in schools. All this, while leading his own small groups and a much-lauded big band.

"It's like a tonic to be in front of a [big] band," he said in 2005. "One feels so grateful for the thing actually happening, knowing that musicians have come because they want to be there." Although The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings described Garrick as "a national treasure", wider recognition eluded him until 2010 when, somewhat belatedly in the view of many, he was appointed MBE.

Garrick's impressive compositional range extended to major choral works and liturgical pieces as well as more conventional big-band scores; his A Zodiac of Angels, a 70-minute work, performed in 1988, combined jazz soloists, a symphony orchestra and chorus, and choreography. It is somehow typical of the man that he was working on a new composition and planning for upcoming concerts while in hospital awaiting surgery.

Garrick was born in Enfield, north London, and became enthused about jazz after hearing boogie-woogie on wartime radio broadcasts. He was largely self-taught, opting after national service to read English literature at University College London, and graduating in 1959. Having already started his first groups while at UCL, he retained an abiding love for England's literature and countryside, often infusing his onstage discourses and his compositions with literary references.

His note for Green and Pleasant Land, a jazz string quartet piece commissioned by the Little Missenden festival in 2002, stated: "My love of England is embodied in Shakespeare, Delius, Keats, Britten and the breathtaking landscapes that still form the greater part of 'this sceptr'd isle'." This perhaps explains why the jazz musician and writer Ken Rattenbury described him as "the JMW Turner of jazz composition". The jazz writer Steve Voce said: "It's not pretentious to describe him as the British Duke Ellington."

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/nov/15/michael-garrick