** 2025 Stock ** With Green and Pleasant Land, Michael Garrick trades cathedrals and big bands for something more furtive and close to the ground: a live, chamber-sized ensemble that treats the English landscape as both subject and medium. Recorded in 2002 at the Little Missenden Festival and the Berkhamsted Jazz Society, the album places Garrick’s piano alongside a small string-based group often centred on violin (frequently his son Chris Garrick), guitar, bass and light percussion. The result is a cycle of pieces that move between folk song, modern jazz and quasi-classical writing without ever announcing the joins, as though the music had simply seeped up from the soil underfoot.
Instead of large, overtly dramatic forms, Garrick works here with modest, tightly drawn canvases. Titles such as “Sad,” “Bladon,” “A Dapper One for Dudley” or the wry “The Empire Strikes Back” hint at villages, dedications and private jokes, but the music beneath them is anything but parochial. Violin lines hover between Celtic inflection and post-bop sharpness; guitar and bass sketch out drones, walking lines or almost Baroque counterpoint; Garrick’s piano starts from hymn-like clarity and slides into unexpected harmonic byways. The live setting keeps everything slightly roughened: you can hear the air of the rooms, the spontaneous choices as the ensemble leans into a phrase or pulls back to a whisper.
Across the album, Garrick’s long-standing preoccupations - faith, memory, the blurred line between sacred and secular - are reframed through pastoral imagery. A gentle waltz figure might suddenly darken into ambiguous harmony, as if storm clouds had moved across a sunny field; a seemingly simple tune is quietly subjected to variation and reharmonisation until it feels like an old folk melody seen through multiple eras at once. There is swing here, but it is often sublimated into lilt and sway rather than overt pulse; improvisations feel conversational, almost like villagers leaning over a pub table to trade stories. The writing for violin and strings in particular shows Garrick’s sensitivity to timbre, using long-held tones and subtle double-stops to colour his progressions rather than to dominate them.
In the arc of Garrick’s discography, Green and Pleasant Land reads as a vital counterweight to his larger sacred and orchestral statements. Where those albums address theology and myth head-on, this one approaches questions of belonging and transcendence sideways, through fields, churchyards and back roads rendered in sound. It is a record of modest scale but deep resonance: the work of a composer-pianist who has learned that revelation can arrive as quietly as a change of light on a hill, or as simply as a four-note figure shared between piano and violin and allowed to bloom, patiently, into something that feels like home.
