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An Interview with Mike Garson
Posted: Sunday, January 21, 2007
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

Many people may not know his name, but it's almost certain that they've heard his music in one form or another. Whether it was the frenetic piano solos on Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile, on stage accompanying the Smashing Pumpkins on the Adore tour, trading jazz chops with Free Flight, or providing his signature atonal flights of fancy on nearly every David Bowie album since 1972, starting with the Ziggy Stardust tour, Mike Garson's sound is unmistakable. Throughout his career, he's worked to hone his craft as a piano and keyboard player, taking part in the synthesizer revolution of the '70s and '80s while still retaining his distinct sense of musical improvisation and composition and redrawing some not-so-fine lines between rock, jazz, and classical music. Besides his appearances on other artists' albums, he's also an accomplished solo artist in his own right, having released a number of albums and music over the Internet, creating a massive body of work that is nothing short of overwhelming. Garson took some time off at the beginning of 2007 to speak with ReGen about his career, his collaborations, and his compositions, from his work with Bowie and Billy Corgan to his opinion of Trent Reznor, and even his interest in rap.

Your latest collaboration is with the French band Kuta, and that's going to be released in April. How did you come to collaborate with this band?

Garson: I think it happened through MySpace several months ago, actually. Alex, my webmaster, had made it known to certain artists that I would play on some of their tracks if I resonated with the music. He sent the tracks to me that I liked very much, and I recorded it in my home studio and basically mailed them the files back. It's just a wonderful way of having not to fly all over the world. I still go out and do studio work for the balance, but not having to do it all the time is really great, especially since I just finished one from Spain and one from Australia, so it's a lot of moving around. It's sort of different from the old days, but I'm able to do it now and nothing seems to suffer.

A lot of people these days, since the advent of the Internet, are starting to collaborate that way. Your most recent release, 2004's Homage to My Heroes, in which you perform a variety of improvisational classical pieces...can you describe what your approach to composition is like? How do you start out? At what point does a set composition end and improvisation begin?

Garson: Initially, many years back, I would compose...let's say the way normal composers would sit down with a pencil and piece of paper and write, whether it's pop music or jazz or classical, that's the way people would compose. But I spent so many years in the art of improvising that about 11 years ago, I started to be able to just sit down at the piano and play from beginning to end, and the composition would be done. In that particular situation, the piano I have is called Disclavier Made, and it's basically a modern day player piano that Yamaha makes. So I would play, and what I played, the notes would play back to me when I push play if I recorded it. And of course, when connected to the computer, I have the ability to do anything I want with it. But that instrument, or that portion of the technology that came about, allowed me to be able to play these pieces and capture them. So I formed a type of music that I call 'Now Music,' which is done in the now, and it's appropriate for the times because a lot of people are aware of being in the moment and creating how you feel in the moment. Since 1994, I'd written about 2,200 classical pieces in that style, and I put out a couple of records with maybe 20 or 30 of those pieces, and then I still have 1,800 sitting on floppy disc that I haven't even transferred over to the computer, but I have no idea how they even sound because it was just the music flowing through me and sometimes five, six, seven, eight pieces a day were coming through. Now, it's more like three, four or five a week. That's how it came about, but prior to that, there was a lot of improvising going on for me in the jazz way, and I still do that at times, but I decided with this Now Music to do it with a classical-sounding music. I stopped using my jazz vocabulary, and a lot of the music I tried to make non-tonal or atonal just to find my own voice within it. It's been a very interesting experiment. I've been teaching it around the world at various universities; they are a little more receptive to it than they are over here. That is because in the academic world, they don't realize truly that that's what Chopin and Bach did. If they did, they would encourage it more; that will start to change in the next 10 years. We just have no recordings of their improvising, as there were no tape recorders or computers 150 years ago.

It's interesting that you mention teaching, because you've taught students and appeared at universities around the world, and according to your Web site, at the University of Southern California, students taking a course in 20th century classical music are required to perform one of your classical compositions.

Garson: That was a few years back. One of the teachers set that up as a requirement for one of the courses, but I'm not sure if it's going on right now anymore. I came back just a few months ago from the Rotterdam Conservatory, where they are much more receptive. I've always taught since I've been very young. If I don't perform and compose and play a lot, I'm not a good teacher, but if I'm performing and playing and fulfilling that part of myself, I love teaching. So, it's a balance. I also don't teach as much as I did many years ago, when I had many students in one day. Now I'll teach a few a week, and then I'll go out to various universities and do master classes, like next month in Pomona, California, where I'll do a Master Class in the afternoon and concert in the evening. One of the professors there will perform some of my prior Now Music, and I will create a few new ones, because my idea with the Now pieces that I write is to give them to classical pianists who don't improvise and let them really go to town with them. I give them the music with the recordings and the written parts. It's kind of a nice balance.

It sounds like it. I only knew your work with Bowie and The Smashing Pumpkins—your appearances on albums—so when I found your Web site and read about all these things you're doing, it's really impressive.

Garson: The interesting thing is that when I play with those kinds of musicians, and also with Trent Reznor, I'm actually employing the same concept, it's just that I'm finding that way of playing to sit comfortably in their tracks over their drumbeats and their voice and that kind of a thing. So it's not just a piece that stands on its own, but it's an accompaniment to work for the music. But if you were to just listen to it by itself, it would have some of the elements of what I just described now, except that when I'm doing it as a solo pianist, I'm making it a complete piece because I'm the melody instrument, so I'm covering all the parts, whereas if I'm doing it with Billy Corgan or with Bowie, I'm supporting them. And then there might be a solo in the middle that uses some of my abilities. But it's conceptually the same idea. It's just less drastic when I'm doing it for another artist because you don't want to overplay and kill the track and step all over them.

I remember that in King Crimson, Robert Fripp would tell Bill Bruford, who comes from a jazz drumming background, to step back and not fill up space so much.

Garson: Yeah, it takes a lot of years to recognize that the space between the notes is as important as the notes. I forget it even to this day, but for the most part, it's embedded in me to know that you need to have space. You can't force it when you're playing, but the awareness of it is what makes the music sound so great. I mean, if you can picture no space, then you just sound like one loud noise. There's no music. There's no separation. So, that was good advice that was given to him. Drummers like to overplay anyway. [Laughs]

You're perhaps best known for your work with David Bowie, having appeared on a great number of his albums and performing live with him on numerous occasions. How have you maintained such a good working relationship with Bowie over so many years? Are there ever any difficulties between the two of you in terms of your approach to making music?

Garson: You know, I think it's a tacit kind of knowingness or agreement that we share regarding art and aesthetics and music and how we view it. I think we think creatively very similarly, even though we don't discuss it and we come from totally different worlds. He comes from the rock world, and I come from the jazz and classical world, but those factors are the mechanics of melody, rhythm and harmony. The actual philosophical viewpoints or the spiritual viewpoints or the creative viewpoints are what we share in common. I've always gone into every new situation with him as if I've never played with him before, so I'm not trying to sit back on my laurels and copy what I've done a year earlier or 20 years earlier. I'm always trying to find something I could play that will serve his music. Sometimes, I even think to myself, if he was a great pianist—he's a good pianist, but if he was a great pianist—what would he play? So I try to play through his head, which is a most workable way of viewing things. So those are the things I know about on a conscious level. On an unconscious level or a spiritual level, it's hard to know why since 1972 I've been doing it, and I'm the oldest member of the band, and how that's come about, because I was initially just hired for eight weeks.

You've also collaborated with Billy Corgan on several occasions, appearing on the Smashing Pumpkins' last album, MACHINA: The Machines of God, as well as performing on the tour for Adore and working with Corgan on the Stigmata soundtrack. Again, how did you come to work with him, and what is the working dynamic like between the two of you? How is working with him different from working with Bowie?

Garson: Well, first of all, he's a big Bowie fan, so he grew up hearing my piano playing, so that was always in his head, and he liked my playing. We happened to end up in Paris both performing on a television show. I was playing with Bowie, and I'd never even heard of the Pumpkins until the mid '90s. We were on the same show, and I looked at them and watched them play, and I liked them! As I left the television station, Bowie introduced me and we were chatting, and I said, 'You know, I'd like to play with you sometime.' He looked at me kind of surprised. A year or two passed, and someone called me when I was doing some jazz touring with my group, and said that there were auditions with Billy Corgan for the Adore tour, and I said, 'Oh, I'd be interested in doing that.' So I told somebody I knew who knew somebody at his record company, and they called the president over there, who called Billy. He was kind of shocked that I would want to play with him, and he couldn't understand why I liked his music. Artists are very funny in that they have their own self doubts. He knew how I played and he didn't know how it could work. I found ways to play with that group and with him, and it was always different than how I play with Bowie, because they're a very loud group, and sometimes I couldn't hear myself, even when I was playing synthesizers, but I found certain parts and a couple of interesting things came about over that period of time. He's quite a talent, and Jimmy is an amazing drummer and so comfortable to play with. And when Stigmata came about, he said that he got offered to do this movie, but that he'd never done a movie before, and that he wouldn't do it unless I would do it with him, and I said, 'Sure.' And I think we found some nice music there too. We're still friends, and I see down the line maybe doing more creative projects with him.

The Pumpkins are reforming, and they've been a little hush-hush about who's involved, but will you be making any appearance on the new release from the Smashing Pumpkins?

Garson: I don't think so, no. I really think they're going back to their roots, and it's going to be guitar-based, that kind of a thing, really strong and early Pumpkins. Maybe down the line, in a few years if things go well, I'd love to come in again. It's nice when I come in and add things on top of these bands. Bowie had already formed the Spiders from Mars when I first started to play with them. I like to bring a new element, sort of like the whipped cream on top of the cake, when I play with these groups. I even did something with Gwen Stefani on a No Doubt album.

I saw that in your discography.

Garson: It was a bonus track on the Return to Saturn album, and very few people have heard it. It's an orchestra and me playing one of her songs. Glen Ballard, the producer who wrote 'Man in the Middle' with Michael Jackson, brought me in, and so I try to find things to contribute. I love playing with pop and rock people because it gives me a chance to find other aspects of myself and work in that world, because I work so much alone and I'm dealing with a lot of avant-garde music and a lot of way out stuff. It brings me in contact with the world, the people, and performance because it can get very isolated with a lot of the kind of music that I do. I can get pretty isolated and lose touch with reality. I'm working on this clarinet sonata that I had a commission to write, just finishing up last night, and I'm working from 1:00 in the afternoon to 2:00 in the afternoon through last night 'til 1:00 in the morning. I wrote it in the same Now style and finding it, and it's not a piece you'd ever hear on the radio, and even if you heard it in a concert, it would be hard to listen to because it's so original, and you're not dealing with a beat the way you are with rock music. So I think it balances me out when I move into these pop and rock areas with these kinds of very creative people. I think I would feel incomplete if I didn't do it. I think if I only did it, I would also feel unfulfilled, so I think it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.

You mentioned an isolated feeling if you're doing just one thing, and on Homage to My Heroes, you have a track called 'Homage to Ligeti.' That would be György Ligeti, right?

Garson: Yes.

He's perhaps best known for his music in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut, and he does have a very distinct cold and lonely sound.

Garson: Well, you figure that a composer stays in the house. It's not the way I do it, but writing with a pen and pencil for five, six, seven, eight hours a day, year after year. But I love his music, and it excited me to write a piece for him. The piece is not obviously how he writes, but there was something that I heard in his etudes that inspired me, so that's how could pay respect to him.

Since the early '80s, you've also been involved in the jazz ensemble Free Flight with flutist Jim Walker. How do you feel that working in this ensemble has helped you to grow in the areas of jazz and classical?

Garson: It was a group that gave me a chance to arrange and compose for the piano, where I was able to use my classical and jazz chops and techniques all in one piece. We would take some famous classical pieces, and I would rearrange them and improvise them. I'd improvise sections with them, and sometimes play the parts exactly, but we were playing with drums and bass and flute on what normally might have just been a piano piece. It was right up my alley, and I've been with them for 18 years. I actually still play with Jim Walker, the flutist. We're just releasing an album via iTunes in about a month called Jim Walker Plays the Music of Mike Garson. They're flute and piano music I wrote for him that's pretty out there. He's a fabulous flute player. He played with the L.A. Philharmonic for many, many years. We still have a relationship musically, and that's still part of my life, and I might do another Free Flight album with him down the line in a few years. I just produced an opera singer this week named Jessica Tivens, very talented, and I took Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' and I wrote my own melody on top of it and had her singing on top of that. So, I still love fooling with that way of creating, but it's certainly served its purpose in the '80s and up to the '90s. I do so much playing with Bowie that I really couldn't keep up dealing with the Free Flight schedule, so I gave it to a friend of mine to continue, but many years have gone on, and they don't play that many concerts a year anymore.

Who would you say, out of all the musicians you've worked with, has had the most significant impact on your life from a musical standpoint?

Garson: There's no question it would be Bowie. Definitely!

What musicians you have not yet performed with, either live or in the studio, who you would like to collaborate with, if there are any?

Garson: I'd like to collaborate with some rap group where I liked what they were saying, if possible, that had these great, great beats that I could put my piano playing on top of, because there's so much space in their music, and so little harmony, and they're so great at rhythms. I would love to play on top of it, and have somebody rapping on top of it, but I would want to be doing it with someone who—aside from being talented—whose message is something I could really identify with, and unfortunately that's rare.

That would be interesting.

Garson: Really interesting. I really enjoyed collaborating with Trent Reznor. I think he's a genius.

'Just Like You Imagined' is perhaps my favorite track from The Fragile. I didn't even read the liners, but I thought, 'This sounds familiar, like something out of David Bowie. Is this Mike Garson?'

Garson: Something that a lot of people don't know is that I actually recorded 15 tracks, but he only used me on three. And I asked him one time how come that was, and he said that my signature was so strong and identifiable with Bowie that he felt it would take away from what he was trying to create. So I told him that I respected him for that.

That was also an album where there was a lot of news about how he'd written so many songs for The Fragile, but only so many ended up on it.

Garson: That's right. But I'll tell you one thing about those tracks: if he ever remixed them without vocals and put them out with the instrumentation that I played to at the time, it would be an amazing solo album for me. I hope someday he produces it for me, because that might be the best album I've ever done, because I'd have access to all of his great sounds and concepts with my playing on top. Here's hoping. He's a busy guy, so it's hard to say.

You also have numerous film and television scores to your credit. How would you say your work in film and TV scores differs from your work with other musicians like Bowie or Corgan? How does your approach to composition change when working on a score?

Garson: The biggest problem in that area is that directors, for the most part, are a pain in the neck, and they're control freaks. So I don't move in there too much, but when I get a director that recognizes what I can contribute, then I love it. I love the medium. But the problem is that most of them try to tell me what to play. It's not that I'm unwilling to listen, but what I feel is what I feel. That's just how it works, because it interferes with my sensibility and what I'm feeling and hearing. It's interference, so I'm hoping to find some new young directors who come from this world that we're talking about, who would trust me. It's as simple as this: if somebody trusts me, I will write a great score for them. If they don't trust me, I actually write horribly. I can't explain it. My music doesn't even become average. It becomes minus. The trust factor was so high when I first played with Bowie. He knew of my jazz and classical career. He trusted me to do what I did, so the intention just flies onto the tape at the time. To me, that's by far the most important factor. I've actually seen it happen where a director doubts me or a jazz band doubts me or a leader doubts me, and my music and my playing gets worse and worse and worse. That doesn't usually happen to the normal musician who's just a good musician who can do their thing, but with me, the music is very connected to the people I'm creating with and the relationships and the trust factor.

If you're going to hire someone, then you hire that person and what they do.

Garson: Exactly! And I've seen directors that wanted me to sound like Trent or someone like that who they can't afford. Well, I get those guys, but they're trying to get it cheaper and hire me, someone who's less known in those fields, and that's what it boils down to. I've had to bow out of those gigs or be silent. It's a lousy feeling.

Having been performing for as long as you have, you've seen the development of keyboard and synthesizer technology over the years. How have you utilized these developments to enhance your own sense of playing and composition?

Garson: Well, you know, I started in 1959. My sister bought me a Wurlitzer keyboard. I was 14, and I then moved onto the Fender Rhodes, and then onto different synths that came out. I used the Moogs and Melotrons when I played with Bowie in the '70s. It's just another series of sounds that can aid my composition and my arrangements. I use them more as augmentations, because I keep my primary goal and intention on the real piano still, because that's who I am and that's what I do. But additionally I have discovered, through 20 or 30 years of messing around with that stuff, some great sample piano sounds that are out there that allow me, when I'm in a situation where I have no piano, to be able to still do my job.

It's always interesting to me how so many people play keyboards and don't know anything about classical music.

Garson: Well, there's a whole school of people who don't learn music the way I learned it, and they still find it. One of the reasons I liked playing with the Spiders from Mars and Bowie was because none of them read, and we learned the music differently, and we created differently, and we came about the music through jamming and things like that. That was all new for me back in the '70s, and I still use it. I still use a lot of that rock 'n' roll sensibility and I bring it into my classical music and jazz. At first, it seemed strange to me when somebody didn't have the training of music and basics that I have, but most schools, when people are growing up, aren't even teaching it anymore, so what are kids going to do? They're going to gravitate towards rap and write some poetry and have a few beats. They don't have to know a lot of chords. They don't have to know a lot of harmony and theory, and they find their own culture of music. It might not always be my cup of tea, but that's just life.

With so much work under your belt, how do you find time to take a breath? What do you do in your spare time?

Garson: I compose and I play. My hobby is my profession. Through all of this, I have a family. I have been with my wife Susan for 38 years, and I have two daughters and five grandchildren. I balance it all out because with the Now Music, I don't have to be writing for eight hours a day. The piece comes, and when it comes through me, I just record it and it might only take a short time. What would take normally two weeks might happen in 10 minutes, so it's a blessing from that viewpoint. I knew at one time, per your question, that I'd be faced with time constraints, so I went into the concept of applying time compression, where I would have to get the same quality done in a day that would normally take a month. I've shifted my thinking and my paradigms around to allow me to get more done without sacrificing the quality by time compression. I don't know how I do it exactly. I just somehow get it done. And there's also this simplicity. Many days, I'll go into my studio at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, and I'm there 'til 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and I won't even realize that 18 hours have passed.

That just shows that you enjoy it.

Garson: I love it! But I also know when not to play and to take a break and listen to other music. Balance. You know, it's a beautiful word, and a hard thing to do. You have to know when you're overplaying. Sometimes I have trouble with my hands from doing so much computer work and writing and playing the piano that if I'm not careful, I won't be able to perform anymore because I overuse them. So I have to be aware of balance.

Now with a new year comes new music. What new music can we expect to hear from Mr. Mike Garson in 2007? Where can it all go from here?

Garson: You know, I have no idea what the year is going to bring. I try to take my Now concept and not turn it into a future concept. I just go with the flow. I'm hoping to write a lot of music, and hoping to play with some great artists, and hoping to do some creative things with Bowie if he feels like it, but I'm just kind of going through time. There's really nothing lined up for the year. I'm just hoping and trusting that things will just find their way, and when they don't, what I usually do is I just compose and practice the piano. It almost doesn't matter. In terms of my creativity and my aesthetics, it doesn't matter. I actually get more done when I'm not touring and performing and working. For some reason, I get more done when I'm in the studio and composing. But, of course, I also love going out and playing for people as well as I love going out and making a living. So, God knows what the future will bring. If it feels good, things usually work out; we'll see wherever it goes.