Liberation in SWING

If jazz polls don’t become collateral damage of COVID-19, Erroll Garner: The Octave Remastered Series (Mack Avenue) is the odds-on favorite for best reissue of 2020. It’s a 12-CD release, one for each LP that the Pittsburgh-born pianist (1921-1977) and his manager Martha Glaser (1921-2014) co-produced on their own Octave Records between 1959 and 1973.

Garner and Glaser established the imprint in 1962 after winning a $265,297.55 cash settlement in a protracted breach-of-contract lawsuit against Columbia Records, Garner’s primary label after 1950. During the decade that followed his signing with Columbia, he had become the most popular jazz instrumentalist in the world not named Louis Armstrong. A consequential factor in that process was his million-selling 1955 live album Concert by the Sea. When negotiating Garner’s contract renewal the year after that artistic and commercial milestone was released, Glaser insisted on a right-of-refusal clause; she successfully litigated it after Columbia subsequently released three albums comprising unauthorized tracks. In addition to the cash, Columbia was ordered to return the physical masters and ownership rights for all unreleased Garner recordings in its vaults made after June 1, 1956. »

This landmark episode in the annals of artist rights wasn’t the first example of Glaser’s militant advocacy on behalf of her sole client. It followed an earlier lawsuit—also successful—against a shifty music publishing outfit to reclaim Garner’s copyright ownership of “Misty.” He debuted that megahit on a 1954 Mercury session, and would interpret it in practically every set he played for the rest of his life, usually before SRO audiences (his contract mandated that they be racially integrated) in concert halls and upscale nightclubs, where both “civilians” and cognoscenti honed into