Moments Delight

Moments Delight is one of Garner's own tunes. Columbia spelled it Moment's Delight when it put it at the head of Other Voices, the album Garner made in New York with an orchestra conducted by Mitch Miller, issued in 1957. Garner never learned to read music, so the arrangements were worked out with Nat Pierce, the pianist and arranger known for his years with Woody Herman, and the same record carries Misty, which Garner had first recorded in 1954, cut again with the orchestra behind it.

This is the tune without the orchestra. On 17 January 1959 Garner played a sold-out Symphony Hall in Boston with his trio, Eddie Calhoun on bass and Kelly Martin on drums, and the tapes went unissued for more than sixty years. Mack Avenue released nine of the pieces in September 2021, the year of Garner's centenary, as Symphony Hall Concert; those nine are about a third of what was played that night, and the complete concert came out the same year in the box set Liberation in Swing. Moments Delight is the sixth of the nine, between Lover and Bernie's Tune, and a review on the official Erroll Garner site calls it expansive and exploratory. That is the Garner of the reputation: the left hand strumming chords like a rhythm guitar, the right hand behind the beat, and a ballad that keeps opening outward.

The transcription is the piano part only: Calhoun and Martin are not in the file. It follows Garner note for note, 5,420 notes in 4:50, nearly nineteen a second, with the two hands on separate MIDI tracks and the sustain pedal written in, 254 events of it. The left hand is nearly as busy as the right, 2,509 notes against 2,911, and the two share ground: the left runs from G flat 1 up to A flat 4 and the right from B flat 3 to A flat 7, so most of an octave around middle C belongs to both, and which hand owns a note there is settled by the track rather than guessed. The piece grows as it goes, from 380 notes in the opening half minute to 769 in the busiest, from 3:30 to 4:00. The key reads as B flat minor, with the middle third turning to D flat major, its relative major, and the last third leaning to G flat major. With the hands apart, the strummed left hand can be practised alone until the chords sit, and the right then slowed down over it without either losing its place.