Here are a few thoughts about Erroll Garner's style. They are based on my love of his playing, but are certainly not intended to be a definitive guide to playing this style.
First let's look at the left hand . This is the basis of Erroll's style. It's a four to the bar strum, like a guitar Freddy Green style. There's something more though, an accented note, a kick beat, every now and then. This accent usually comes just before beat four in the bar. It also very often comes in the fourth bar of a four bar phrase.
To explain a bit further. Let's say we're playing F7 in a particular bar. A voicing for this in root position would be F A C Eb (the C being middle C). To do the kick beat play a chord on beat one, two and three, then play the lowest note F before beat four and the remaining 3 notes of the voicing on beat four. The single F should be accented, the chords quiet. This could be turned into a practice exercise.
/F7 /Bb7 / Eb7 /Ab7 /Db7etc through the cycle of 5ths /root pos /2nd inv / root pos / 2nd inv / root pos /
This accented note is sometimes the bottom note of the voicing, sometimes the top one.
Another thing which breaks up this four to the bar pattern is an off beat improvised phrase in octaves in the left hand. A good example is Just One of Those Things in 1961 from the Dreamstreet album. At the end of the B section in the theme statement Erroll plays the tune in tremolos in the right while the left hand plays a phrase in octaves using dotted crotchets instead of crotchets. Each note is now one and a half beats long and creates a three against two feel for four bars. This is a technique Erroll used quite frequently near the end of a section of the tune and its an effective way of breaking up the regular pattern.
In the right hand he usually played the tune in octaves, with perhaps some chord notes inserted. If there was a break in the melody's phrases he would insert a big band style chorded answer to the tune, usually in minims. He does this in Just One of Those Things quite often in the A sections. Many of the four bar sections work out like this:- Tune two bars--chord answer in minims two bars, left hand "kick beat" to finish off the section. The kick beat acts as a sort of punctuation mark.
Other right hand techniques used in playing the melody or elsewhere are:-
1. Octave tremolos, a rapid alternation of notes at the octave to create a shake effect. It gives the impression of a sustained note.
2. "Hammering on" - in this technique an expected melody note is replaced by a note a semitone below but slides up to the correct note a quaver later. The melody note is frequently then repeated twice more to fill up two beats, and the whole process is done again. You can hear this in bars 9 and 10 of I'll Remember April, Concert by the Sea, and bars 13 and 14 of Just One of Those Things. Its all played in octaves of course!
3. Lagging. This is where the right hand falls slightly behind the left for a number of bars.
4. Occasionally Erroll employed a block chord technique similar to George Shearing.
All the above techniques are used in the first chorus, playing the tune.
The next chorus is normally improvised single note melody with the four in a bar left hand accompaniment. Other things come in from time to time, the big band answers at the end of phrases, and sometimes improvised lines played in octaves or tremolos.
For some typical Garner right hand patterns click here.
A typical last chorus is Just One of Those Things. He liked to bring in a "shout" chorus. Big chords alternate with quieter single note passages. The form of the tune is A A B A.
A section / 4 bar riff like phrases derived from the melody played in block chords in both hands / 4 bars similar / next 8 bars single note improvisation, ending off with the big band minim chords/
A section / 8 bars as above / 8 bars improvisation - (in octaves this time) /
B section / 16 bars of tune and fill in improvisation played in octaves with occasional tremolos.
A section / 8 bars as before / next 4 bars is "tagged" or repeated twice before finishing with a coda in big chords.
Bob Hudson August 2003.
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