Red Garland

Red Garland (1923-1984) was born William McKinley Garland Jr in Dallas, Texas, and took the nickname from his hair. He started on clarinet and alto saxophone and studied with Buster Smith, the saxophonist who had been Charlie Parker's mentor. He joined the Army in 1941 and was posted to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where he boxed as an amateur, losing a bout to Sugar Ray Robinson, and where he began learning the piano from two Army pianists, John Lewis and Lee Barnes. Discharged in 1944, he taught himself the rest from Czerny and Hanon exercise books, copying Count Basie early on.

He was the pianist of the Miles Davis Quintet from 1955 to 1958, with John Coltrane, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, on The New Miles Davis Quintet in 1956, the Prestige albums Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and Steamin', and 'Round About Midnight and Milestones for Columbia. He helped popularise block chords in jazz piano, and the voicings were his own, with Ahmad Jamal, Nat Cole and Bud Powell behind them: a style that, in Ira Gitler's phrase, eschews the flowery and champions the direct approach. The relationship with Davis was deteriorating by 1957, his attendance grew increasingly erratic, and he left in 1958.

Between 1956 and 1962 he made twenty-five albums for Prestige, the first ten or so with Paul Chambers and Art Taylor, the trio on A Foggy Day in this store. In the later sixties rock cut into jazz record sales and his own, and he went home to Dallas to care for his mother; after her death in 1968 he withdrew from music. He recorded again from 1971, for MPS, and Crossings in 1977 reunited him with Philly Joe Jones. By 1978 he was back in clubs, among them Keystone Korner in San Francisco, where this page's portrait was taken. He died in Dallas in 1984, aged 60.