Michael Garrick
Home Thoughts
Home Thoughts is the late, luminous farewell from Michael Garrick, written for his Lyric Ensemble and recorded in 2011. Working with poetry by Shakespeare, Browning, Blake and others, he fashions 12 song-like pieces where jazz harmony, chamber textures and spoken or sung verse fuse into an intimate, autumnal meditation on memory, love and mortality.
Tone Poems
Tone Poems sees Michael Garrick orchestrating textures and images in a powerful display of big-band colour. Released in 2011 and performed by the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra, the suite of eight pieces draws on myth, landscape, and autobiography - each composition unfolding as a miniature drama of shifting harmony and luminous ensemble interplay.
Green and Pleasant Land
Green and Pleasant Land finds Michael Garrick turning the English landscape into chamber jazz, writing for a luminous string-based group with piano at its centre. Across live performances from the early 2000s, he folds folk melody, hymn fragments and knotty improv into quietly radical miniatures that make the countryside feel haunted, restless and very much alive.
The New Quartet
The New Quartet introduces Michael Garrick in close-up, stripped of choirs and orchestras and thrown into agile, conversational post-bop with Martin Hathaway, Paul Moylan and Alan Jackson. Across standards, Garrick originals and nods to Joe Harriott and Jaco Pastorius, the 2002 session turns lyricism into a pressure test, revealing how much drama four voices can conjure in a small room.
Down on Your Knees
On Down on Your Knees, Michael Garrick revisits his sacred-jazz obsessions through the language of a modern small big band, setting hymns, blues, and standards in luminous, late-20th-century colour. With vocalist Anita Wardell alongside Martin Shaw, Steve Waterman, Jim Tomlinson and others, the 1999 album feels like a devotional songbook rewritten for restless, metropolitan believers.
Lady of the Aurian Wood: A Magic Life of Duke
In Lady of the Aurian Wood: A Magic Life of Duke, Michael Garrick salutes Ellington not with imitation but with a gleaming fever-dream of big-band narrative. Writing for the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra with Norma Winstone in a central role, he turns characters, ghosts and side-stories from Duke’s orbit into a 12-part, 75-minute suite of blues, prayer and hall-of-mirrors swing.
Peter Pan Jazzdance Suite
Peter Pan Jazzdance Suite lets Michael Garrick turn J. M. Barrie’s myth into airborne big-band theatre. Written for the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra and premiered for his 70th birthday, this 2003 suite paints Peter, Wendy, the Darlings, Tink, Hook, and the Lost Boys in vividly dancing themes that swing, drift, and menace by turns.
Gigs: Introducing Michael Garrick
Gigs: Introducing Michael Garrick catches Michael Garrick on the bandstand rather than in the chapel, a pianist still forming his voice through standards, ballads, and early originals. This live-feeling 2008 release frames him with a tight trio setting, revealing a restless, harmonically alert player already bending the jazz canon toward his own lyric intensity.
Yet Another Spring
On Yet Another Spring, Michael Garrick enlarges his sacred-jazz universe into a full-scale orchestral meditation on birth, loss, and renewal. Scored for the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra with recurring features for Norma Winstone, the 2006 suite moves from intimate prayer to blazing big-band catharsis, treating the life cycle as both liturgy and drama.
Inspirations
Inspirations finds Michael Garrick turning inward with his New Quartet, distilling a lifetime of big ideas into melodic, small-group conversation. Recorded in 2006, it honours John Coltrane’s legacy without mimicry, letting Garrick, Martin Hathaway, Paul Moylan, and Alan Jackson reimagine spiritual intensity as supple, lyrical post-bop.
Children of Time
On Children of Time, Michael Garrick stretches his sacred-jazz imagination into cosmic scale, writing for the Jazz Britannia Orchestra and reuniting with vocalist Norma Winstone to explore creation myths, Eucharistic ritual, and his own visionary texts. The result is a 2006 suite that feels like a liturgy drifting through deep space, turning theology into glowing, unsettled sound.
Jazz Praises at St. Paul's
With Jazz Praises at St. Paul's, Michael Garrick welds liturgical grandeur to jazz improvisation, conjuring an atmosphere as reverent as it is free. Featuring the Michael Garrick Sextet, John Marshall, and the St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir, this 2005 release radiates both spiritual inquiry and creative boldness, transcending boundary with every motif.
Big Band Harriott
Big Band Harriott finds Michael Garrick scaling Joe Harriott’s music up to a roaring jazz orchestra, preserving the original’s sharp lines and Caribbean-inflected bite while opening them into rich new voicings, long arcs of tension and release, and solos that underline just how modern this repertoire still feels.
Late Autumn Sunshine
Late Autumn Sunshine by Michael Garrick, released by My Only Desire Records, gathers two rare BBC Maida Vale sessions from 1973 and 1978. With Norma Winstone’s ethereal voice and Henry Lowther’s lyrical trumpet, Garrick’s compositions glow with his characteristic blend of English pastoralism and modal jazz introspection—a rediscovery of autumnal warmth and luminous craft.
The Complete Fingers Remember Mingus
For the first time ever, the complete recording sessions for the Spotlite vinyl album ‘Fingers Remember Mingus’ expanded with bonus tracks. The original album sessions, and the extra tracks, were all recorded between 1979 and 1983. Co-produced by Jazz In Britain with Dave Green, who formed and led the Fingers quartet and who provided most of the recordings from his own tape archive and wrote new notes to complement the 24 page booklet which compiles contemporary reviews and articles about Finger…
Prelude To Heart Is A Lotus
2013 release. Previously unavailable, this unearthed 1968 BBC Session contains markedly different versions from Michael Garrick's 1970 classic 'Heart Is A Lotus' album. A Londoner's rain-soaked riposte to modal jazz exotica, this long lost recording is already being hailed as an essential release. Michael Garrick’s 1970 LP Heart Is A Lotus went on to become one of the most important British jazz albums of the subsequent decade. For a few years prior to the record’s release Garrick and his sextet…