Erroll Garner

He says, "No, tonight you're, you're playing drums.

We have a new piano player." And the new piano player was Erroll Garner.

[laughs]

Wow.

So my father had some very old record- recordings at home.

I mean, uh, Tommy Dorsey, uh, Bud Powell, uh, uh, also Erroll Garner.

Wow.

Um, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton Big Band, uh, Dizzy Gillespie.

And especially at the end of the day, when I'm kind of sick of thinking about music, but I still want to hear something, you know, James Taylor's my guy.

But I felt like even in the jazz world, there was, if people had like, like Errol Garner and George Shearing, for example, they had a lot of popular, you know, popularity and they really bridged a regular people liked them, but they were considered, there's something about joy or happiness in the sound that, you know, when it's talked to, when it was taught to me, it was kind of like, oh, those guys are, you know, they were, they were just like a, aside to the story, when so many people would see them as the story.

I run into this in the film business all the time, that if it's not dark, it's not art.

If it's not sad and talking about how perverse the world is, then it's not really artistic.

[subway rumbles] Passengers on the subway, Stanley was there.

A boxer in the village, a dog's life, a radio host, Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift, jazz musicians like Erroll Garner and Eddie Condon.

[jazzy music] Stanley even shot a photo essay of nervous patients at the dentist, an idea he got because he was one of those anxious patients.

[jazzy music] Some of his photos were staged, with Stanley directing the scene.

... music.

And because of him and with him, uh, he took me to Erroll Garner concert, to a, a Duke Ellington concert, to Oscar Peterson concert, to Count Basie concert.

So with him, great luck, I, I discovered jazz music.

And then, uh, you have to have in mind, I had classical music on one side, Cuban, you know, like, South American vibe-

I hadn't realised quite how hip she was.

She actually turned me on to Fats Waller, Errol Garner, and a whole mess of...

You know, jazz piano players.

So I had a sort of upbringing that encompassed any kind of music that you care to mention.

He was chortling and boisterously laughing about what he was doing.

like an Errol Garner or any improvising musician gets high on the improvising, he was having a hell of a good time.

And then he'd see all these people emotionally torn up by what he was putting out through the piano.

He couldn't understand it.