JAZZ BY JEREMY

TOM GARLING: YOU GOT IT!

If you turn out to be a professional musician, the sound of your teenage bedroom is probably a bit different to the average school kid. Blasting out of my well-barricaded garret at that stage of life was among many things, Mahler Symphonies, Puccini and Wagner operas, JJ Johnson and Watrous and of course, Maynard Ferguson. The chops and the charts were always firmly in the ‘gratuitous’ category and Maynard always had young up-and-coming players in the bands, straight out of the American jazz colleges like Manhattan School of Music, Eastman and Berklee. It was all pretty inspiring. Virtuosity and showmanship were kings, and the peak of the solos and all those 4-bar breaks gave the sort of rush you get from your team scoring a goal. So, when I’d done with the German angst of Tristan and Isolde and had enough of Puccini heroines committing suicide, on came the Maynard!

Imagine my delight several years later when Maynard Ferguson’s Big Bop Noveau came to Ronnie Scott’s, London, in the late Nineties. It was certainly a memorable night and the main reason turned out to be the star trombonist in the band, Tom Garling.

According to his website, Tom Garling studied at Berklee College in Boston during the mid 1980s, got hired while still a student by Buddy Rich, and then got a full scholarship to do a masters at the University of Miami. Shortly after, Maynard Ferguson hired him as trombonist and Musical Director of Big Bop Nouveau, a mini Big Band of just two saxes, three trumpets, one trombone and rhythm section.

Now let’s be honest, all musicians like applause and whoops and hollas of affirmation from the audience, and jazz musicians are no exception. In fact, jazz musicians like a clap after every solo, not just at the end of a piece. On a jazz gig, the biggest clap nearly always goes to the drummer, then saxophonist, then trumpeter but probably quite low down the list on the clapometer is the trombone. But Tom Garling was turning the tables on the band and even on Maynard himself with consistently the biggest reaction from the crowd every time he took a solo.

Thanks as ever to Rob Egerton for dashing off this transcription of You Got It for us. You can watch and listen to the solo on Rob’s YouTube channel, which now features his transcriptions unfolding in real time alongside the original performances, well worth further exploration. Don’t forget to like and subscribe.

Let’s get into the solo and try to see what is in that magical elixir for soloing!

Five choruses of Blues in Bb ensue, starting the first chorus on the third bar in. It’s good to look at blues solos as three interconnected four bar phrases, each inhabiting a different part of the structure, then look at how each four-bar section prepares the next. Very often Tom Garling plays a line into the next section and at the top of each new ‘four’ plays something to distinctly outline the new harmonic territory. This is a basic premise of ‘changes playing’ but here done in a very direct and straight between the eyes kind of fashion. Towards the end of each chorus (bars 11, 12) there is often tension through chromaticism that launches the next chorus. See bars 21 and 22 that have chromatic tension held over the cadence, not released until bar two of next chorus with a simple Bb triad. The rhythmic language is very appealing as well as it often deploys a four-square on the beat motif, reminiscent of Michael Brecker and commonly adopted in the 1990s by various hard bop exponents. That rhythmic language is of course balanced nicely with other syncopated ideas and gratuitous blues playing, such as the chorus that starts bar 35. Overall, I think the secret to why this sounds so exciting is that the tension and resolution is so well balanced and there is a very smart deployment of structural devices. He really knows when to pull out the range card for dramatic effect and play accessible blues after some very hip outside chromaticism. Then of course, the delivery is astonishing: a big brash sound with hard articulation and a ton of fast air, whistling down the horn, all with great time and dexterity. Congratulations to Tom Garling for taking on the post-Brecker tough-tenor impersonators and putting it onto the trombone so superbly. What a great role model. Better get to the University of Illinois where he is now teaching.