** 2025 Stock ** The album Jazz Praises at St. Paul’s stands as a singular synthesis of sacred music and jazz’s emotive power, propelled by the unwavering vision of Michael Garrick. Captured within the acoustic embrace of St. Paul’s Cathedral, this project unites the Michael Garrick Sextet—featuring the leader on piano, joined by John Marshall (drums), and a coterie of Britain’s most intrepid jazz musicians—alongside the hallowed voices of the St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir. Released in 2005, decades after the original performances, these recordings bear the intensity and ambition of an era unafraid to fuse the church with the club and the psalm with the solo.
From the opening notes of “Anthem” through the modal invocation of “Sanctus” and the searching lyricism of “Kyrie,” Garrick crafts a space where improvisation does not disrupt reverence but magnifies it. The interplay between brass, reeds, and the Cathedral’s choral power turns each composition into a ritual, but these are rituals of risk: hymns yielded to swing, sanctity set upon a 6/8 groove. The musicians—likely including stalwarts such as Don Rendell or Ian Carr (common Garrick collaborators in this era)—match the choir’s gravity with nimble, searching lines, advancing Garrick’s quest for a truly British jazz language. John Marshall’s rhythms and Garrick’s own piano, alternating between meditative ripples and declamatory flourishes, navigate between the poles of contemplation and exultation.
These performances position jazz not as a genre, but as an act of devotion—sometimes jubilant, sometimes austere, always alive to the possibility of transcendence. Jazz’s encounter with liturgy here is not merely respectful but transformative, each tradition intensifying the other. The album’s 12 tracks traverse arcs of praise and lament, exalting the cathedral’s stone with the volatility of creative encounter. Fifty years since the first notes rang out, Jazz Praises at St. Paul’s continues to startle: a document where collective spirit and individual invention move, inseparably, toward the sublime.
