Finding a gem: Erroll Garner
It always feels like a gift when I find out about a new person, place or thing without searching for it.
My uncle is a music lover and over the phone one day we talk about the jazz greats. Really it’s him putting me on to all of the jazz greats he knows. He mentions Fats Waller and when we get off the phone, I start searching. My main search is for Fats, but if I see videos that catch my eye along the way, I save em for later.
A video of Erroll Garner is one of those videos I saved for later, and forgot about. Months after, I come across the saved video and decide to watch. At this point, I’m blown away and completely engaged. I’ve never heard someone play the piano this way, nor share the magnificence of their character with such grace on stage. He is indeed a giant.
But the story wouldn’t be complete without a synchronicity.. I first saw this video around July 2021. Even though I know Garner is a renowned musician, I felt I might be one of the few people in my age range who was interested in him at the time. To my surprise Adele dropped an album in November 2021 that included a song featuring Garner. So now I’m curious to know how Adele and her team came to know about Mr. Garner, and what inspired them to include him on the album. Hmm…
Check out the video below to see the magnificence that is Erroll Louis Garner.
Garner’s musical genius—his ability to ‘play along with the Muzak’ or play anything he’d ever heard without knowing how to read music in the traditional sense—speaks to a certain energy he was tapped into.
Bobby Hemmitt often mentioned the importance of playing the music of great jazz musicians that have passed away, like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. The powerful energies of their beings can be channeled through their one-of-a-kind music.
Now what is this energy that makes Garner’s (and others’) music so amazing? What are they tapped into? Their connection with dark, primordial energy ushered wondrous musical frequencies through their vessels.
Fear of the dark or so-called evil is a tactic employed to keep us from tapping into these vast energy sources. Primordial energy is nothing but the energy that existed before creation. Just because we may not understand it does not make it bad. Because of the immense power of this energy, anything associated with it has been deemed taboo. We’ve been pushed away from dealing with the dark—which exists on the same level as the light, just as the opposite polarity.
When we heard the saying ‘Evil is good!’ in the film Vampire in Brooklyn, what was that trying to tell us? More on this later…