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Garrick's Fairground

Mr. Smith's Apocalypse

Vocalion CDSML 8433

'Garrick' is pianist/composer Michael Garrick, the 'Fairground' is a reference to the use of a portable pipe organ in the recording, and 'Mr Smith' is singer/librettist John Smith, who approached Garrick after a performance of the latter's 'Jazz Praises' at St Paul's and said: 'Jazz Praises is all very well, Mr Garrick, but I feel there should be some kind of statement.

Have you ever thought of writing a cantata? I'll write you one.' The result is this theodicy (although it does not so much justify the works of God to man as point to the entirely human origin of the impulse to believe), a somewhat eccentric philosophical enquiry into evil, ultimate responsibility and the nature of deity, to name just three of its subjects.

It involves said organ, four main vocalists including Norma Winstone and Smith himself, an amateur choir, a children's chorus and Garrick's usual jazz suspects, trumpeter Henry Lowther, reedsmen Don Rendell and Art Themen, bassist Coleridge Goode and drummer Trevor Tomkins.

Garrick's music is by turns touching and contemplative, vibrant and abrasive, as required by the wide-ranging nature of Smith's libretto, and – top and tailed by his 'Epiphany' and 'Blessed are the Peacemakers' (from an EP first released in 1971) – this singular album provides yet more evidence of the extraordinary imaginative range and power of UK jazz in the 1970s.