Jazz breaking news: Influential pianist and composer Michael Garrick dies aged 78

Garrick, born on 30 May 1933 in the London suburb of Enfield in Middlesex, studied English Literature at University College London and as a musician was self taught, although he took lessons at the Ivor Mairants School of Dance Music, and later in the 1970s attended Berklee in Boston as a mature student.

He began to mount poetry and jazz concerts from the late-1950s onwards and led a quintet that included free form pioneer Joe Harriott and trumpeter Shake Keane. Garrick is mostly remembered for his work from 1965-9 as the pianist in the Don Rendell-Ian Carr quintet and for his own sextet in the latter part of the 1960s who recorded the acclaimed albums October Woman, Black Marigolds and The Heart Is A Lotus. Garrick famously recorded Jazz Praises at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. But as well as church music he was interested in Indian music and he was also an active pioneering jazz educator, a defiantly idiosyncratic one. His best known compositions are ‘Dusk Fire’ and ‘Black Marigolds’. Performing until very recently, Michael Garrick will be very much missed.

– Stephen Graham