Billboard : 08/18/1956
Spotlight on… selection

This package is the first Garner LP recoded while he was playing before a concert audience (at Carmel, Calif.). The pianist’s brilliant jazz technique and tender touch are showcased on a group of standards and originals – I’ll Remember April, Teach Me Tonight, Mambo Carmel, etc. Cover, an eye-catching photo of a Carmel seascape, is perfectly keyed to the title theme. Excellent for jazz jocks and romantic segs on pop shows.

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Billboard : 08/18/1956
Album Cover of the Week

The raging sea pounding on the rocky shore, always a powerful eye-catcher, is the attractive theme for this cover. The photograph, done in natural color, with the title standing out in shades of orange and lavender, is a natural for display.

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Cashbox : 08/18/1956

The recording was made at a Garner concert in Carmel, California. As with most on-the-spot pressings, the artist is usually at his best because he’s playing for people rather than, specifically, for a recording microphone. In the 11 selections, covering a host of moods, Garner adds his inventive touch giving the tunes unusual turns in their structure. The grand enthusiasm of the audience indicates Garner’s success at the performance. Jazz fans, sales-wise, should prove the point further.

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Down Beat : 10/03/1956
Ralph J. Gleason : 5 stars

Garner’s return to Columbia is auspicious. This album recorded at a Jimmy Lyons concert in Carmel, Calif., in the fall of 1955, is blessed with the sort of recording which captures every nuance of Garner’s brilliant coloring. In addition, he was in a particularly ebullient mood that night, and it shines through his playing.

Perhaps the key to the quality of the album is in his transformation of the hit parade tune, Teach Me, tattered by countless repetitions on the jukeboxes. Via his hands it emerges, slowly and lovingly, as a fine, shimmering example of Garner’s most romantic musical nature. Throughout the album the electric combination of his compelling rhythm, his unequaled gift for shading and kaleidoscopic coloring, makes each number rich in emotional experience for those who are not prevented by his penchant for tonal painting from reveling in the results.

April contains all the Garner tricks of crescendos, climaxes, left-hand chordal bombs, crashing chords and easy flowing rhythm. All Right is one of those racing ballads which he seems to embue with crackling spirit, and Leaves is pure impressionism.

The cover is almost as good as the album, a striking photograph of rocks and sea on the California coast. The notes err in crediting Red Top to Woody Herman; it’s actually the Hampton-Kenyard tune that King Pleasure brought to life with lyrics, and How Could You? is not a Garner original but Tyree Glenn’s composition for Ellington, Sultry Serenade. This is highly recommended for Garner devotees and might be the sort of thing to convince others of his value. It is among his best works.

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Liner Notes by George Avakian

In a time when jazz artists are turning increasingly to the concert stage, it may seem surprising that this album is the first to be released (in 1956) by Erroll Garner playing before a concert audience. The reason for this delay is simple. No one ever thought of recording a Garner concert before, although Erroll is an artist who is keenly receptive to the interchange of stimulation between audience and artist.

Erroll was one of the first jazz instrumentalists to give a full evening’s recital in a concert hall, in the Music Hall in Cleveland on March 27, 1950. Martha Glasser, who presented that concert, also produced and staged the one at which the present recording was made, in Carmel, California. Jimmy Lyons, the disc jockey (now with KDON in Monterey) whose knowledgeable programming of jazz and assistance to west coast musicians is a legend in the northern California area, was the promoter of the concert.

Erroll has often told interviewers that his music reflects everything around him; as he puts it, “I play all the sounds I hear.” The conditions preceding this concert were ideal, and Erroll’s playing attests to this. He arrived in Carmel at sundown, after driving, with his accompanists, from San Francisco along the Pacific Coast – one of the most beautiful roadways in the United States. The moods of San Francisco, Carmel, the ocean, the traffic, and the good humor of his sidemen during the trip are all wrapped up in Erroll’s performance.

Garner was in championship form in this concert. Performing with a sense of building which few musicians can match, he played a program that was impeccably paced, stimulatingly developed, and blazing with enthusiasm. At 33, he has been an established giant of the piano for so many years that he is often taken for granted. This album is a great introduction to those who have not yet become Garner fans, and especially exciting to those in his loyal coterie who say “Erroll’s our man – he’s always great,” but who haven’t really stopped to take note of his continued development within his own unique structural style.

The Carmel concert was staged under ideal conditions. The auditorium, which used to be a Gothic-style church, was perfect acoustically. The audience was completely responsive to every nuance of Erroll’s performance.

The contents of this album were pretty much determined by what Erroll hadn’t recorded for Columbia. Everything he played was of extraordinary quality, which is usual with Erroll’s one-shot performances, so we simply let out the record tunes which he plays in response to requests.

I’ll Remember April is a jazz standard by now. Erroll gives it his slightly off-center rock, in which he seems to pluck notes out of the piano instead of depress keys. The chuckles and applause acknowledging the crowd’s recognition of the them after one of Erroll’s typical intros is something which has become a hallmark of all Garner audiences.

Teach Me Tonight finds Erroll loping at his swingiest. So thoroughly does he take over this meaty pop that someone who wandered into my office as I was playing the test pressing said immediately, “What’s that – an original?” When informed that it was a pop tune, he exclaimed, “But surely it was written for Erroll?!”

Mambo Carmel finds Erroll exploring the Latin mood a bit; he has taken something of a fancy to this particular rhythm, without losing any of the jazz content of his mambo interpretations. Of course, there wasn’t any title to this piece when he played it; it was just something which had been growing gradually for a few performances, and this one captures the essence of this new piece as though he had been playing it for years.

Erroll caresses Autumn Leaves with almost Gallic rapture (ivresse, I believe is the local term), and romps through It’s All Right with Me with Garneresque abandon, tossing off unexpected chords at the ends of phrases here and there.

Red Top is a bop blues classic, swung with a series of tongue-in-cheek quotes and paraphrases. M. Garnair returns to action again with April in Paris, which is again a combination of tenderness and firm love-making. The fabulous Garner strut appears once more in They Can’t Take That Away from Me; quite definitely Erroll is the only pianist who can make like a drum major while sitting down, and swing at the same time.

Tyree Glenn’s How Could You Do a Thing Like That to Me has become something of a classic by now; one does not think of it any more as an original, but as a familiar jazz standard. Where or When turns out to be unexpectedly fast, with a strong feeling of three against four in the first chorus. The set closes with Erroll’s Theme, a cute bluesy bit he uses as a signature, and an event unique in the history of Erroll Garner concerts; the concert had built to such heights that in order to get Erroll off, Jimmy Lyons had to ask him for a curtain speech. It is one of the shortest and most succinct curtain speeches in history, and we just couldn’t leave it out.

With Erroll on this recording are his fine accompanists, Denzil Best on drums and Eddie Calhoun on bass. The voice you hear occasionally, in the manner of Toscanini exhorting his musicians, is Erroll, actively conducting with head, hands, shoulders, and vocal cords. As always, Erroll gave everything he had; there were two intermissions, and Erroll was drenched at the end of each of the three sections of the concert. Fortunately, he had the foresight to bring four complete changes of clothes – and he used them!

As these notes are written, Erroll is preparing for still another solo recital in Town Hall in New York, where he first appeared in December 1950. More concert appearances, in programs entitled “Evening with Erroll Garner”, are to follow, and shortly after this album is released Erroll will be off on his first full-scale concert tour of Europe.