** 2025 Stock ** Down on Your Knees catches Michael Garrick at the threshold of his final creative surge, folding decades of sacred experiments, club work and orchestral ambition into a generous, 13-track programme. Recorded in 1999 with an expanded band and clocking in at over an hour, the album plays like a personal hymnal exploded outward: original pieces, reimagined Garrick classics and canonic songs sit side by side, each asked the same question about what faith, doubt and swing can say to one another at century’s end. The opening sequence moves from the solemn tread of “Day of Atonement” into the extended sermon of “Blues Without End” and a newly charged version of “Dusk Fire,” Garrick’s signature theme recast here as both memory and renewed statement.
Around Garrick’s piano gathers a notably rich cast. Vocalist Anita Wardell occupies a central role, navigating lyrics and wordless lines with a clarity that can switch in an instant from choirmaster poise to club-floor intimacy. Trumpeters Martin Shaw and Steve Waterman provide contrasting angles of brass light - one burnished and lyrical, the other more cutting and declarative - while saxophonists such as Jim Tomlinson and Paul Booth give the arrangements a conversational grain, trading brittle, Parker-descended bebop runs for longer, more modal arcs when Garrick pulls the harmony open. The rhythm section keeps the whole thing buoyant: bass and drums move easily between straight-ahead swing, slow-burning gospel shuffles and subtly funk-edged grooves, giving the band the flexibility to pivot from chapel to bandstand and back again.
Stylistically, the record is a compendium of Garrick’s fixations. Hymn-like themes are reharmonised with stealthy chromatic sidesteps, turning familiar cadences into moments of gentle estrangement. Blues forms stretch into long, emotionally graded narratives in which solos feel less like displays than like confessions, each chorus taking the title’s imperative - get down on your knees - as both spiritual metaphor and practical instruction: bow before the tune, the tradition, the act of playing itself. Standards and songbook pieces, when they surface, are treated as live material rather than relics; Garrick enjoys shading their inner voices, letting Wardell’s phrasing tug against the band, or dropping the ensemble away to leave a single horn testifying over quietly tolling piano chords.
Taken as a whole, Down on Your Knees reads less as a themed project than as a lived-in notebook from a musician for whom the sacred and the everyday have long since bled into one another. It offers a snapshot of Garrick’s late-90s band at full stretch, yes, but also a kind of manifesto-in-practice: that jazz can still wrestle with big moral and spiritual questions without losing its sense of fun, that devotion might sound like a blistering trumpet solo or a barely audible closing cadence. For listeners tracing his path into the vast suites of the 2000s, this album stands as a vital hinge - the point where the preacher-pianist in Garrick learns to speak directly, one tune at a time, without ever abandoning the cathedrals resonating in his head.
