** 2025 Stock ** With Peter Pan Jazzdance Suite, Michael Garrick takes his long-standing fascination with story, ritual, and melody into the realm of full-blown jazz ballet. Composed to mark his 70th birthday and recorded in 2003 with the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra, the suite uses J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as a springboard for a 10-part musical portrait rather than a literal retelling. Across nearly seventy minutes, Garrick treats each character and episode - from “Peter Pan” and “Mrs Darling” through “The Lost Boys,” “Tink,” “The Pirates,” and “Captain Hook” - as an opportunity to fuse narrative clarity with his characteristically oblique harmonies and shifting metres. The result feels less like background music for dancers and more like a radio play in sound alone, where motive, texture, and groove outline the action for the listener’s inner theatre.
The Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra provides the necessary dramatic range. Reeds and brass function as an expanded cast: bright, darting saxophone lines sketch Peter’s aerial mischief; murmuring lower brass and woodwinds hint at London’s nocturnal domesticity; snarling trumpets and trombones summon the swagger and menace of Hook and his crew. Garrick’s rhythm section - piano, bass, and drums augmented at times by percussion - keeps the music in constant motion, lacing straight-ahead swing with Latin inflections, waltz-time episodes, and quasi-military struts. Garrick’s own piano acts like a narrator stepping into the frame: he introduces themes with crystalline simplicity, then reappears later to twist them into darker or more reflective shapes, suggesting the story’s undercurrent of melancholy beneath its fantasy surface.
What distinguishes Peter Pan Jazzdance Suite from many literary “concept albums” is Garrick’s refusal to treat the score as mere pastiche. Instead of quoting period music or leaning on obvious theatrical tropes, he writes in his mature late style: knotty but singable melodies, harmonies that pivot between diatonic warmth and sudden chromatic shadows, and ensemble writing that gives soloists room to shape the drama in real time. Improvised spots function like soliloquies - brief windows into a character’s interior world - before the full orchestra sweeps back in to carry the plot forward. That balance between pre-planned architecture and live invention mirrors the story’s own tension between the fixed myth of Neverland and the fleeting nature of childhood itself.
Within Garrick’s broader catalogue, this suite sits alongside works like Children of Time and Yet Another Spring as evidence of his gift for large-scale musical storytelling. Where those projects take on theology and the life cycle, Peter Pan Jazzdance Suite explores the politics of imagination: escape versus responsibility, fantasy versus mortality, all filtered through vivid, rhythmically alert writing for a contemporary British jazz orchestra. It is both accessible and slyly complex - a record that children could dance to, and one that seasoned listeners can return to for the harmonic side-glances and orchestrational jokes hiding just behind the primary colours of the tale.
