Garland Still Had Plenty Left
Red Garland in 1979 sounds relaxed and confident — a pianist who had nothing left to prove.
By the late 1970s, Red Garland had been largely absent from recording for years, and his return on the Galaxy label raised a reasonable question: was this a comeback or just a nostalgia exercise? Strike Up the Band, recorded in 1979 and released in 1981, answers that pretty clearly. This is a working pianist playing at a comfortable, unhurried pace — not trying to reinvent himself, not chasing whatever jazz was doing at the time, just settling into the kind of hard bop trio playing he had always done well. If you come in expecting fireworks, you might be underwhelmed. If you come in expecting a good evening of piano jazz, you will leave satisfied.
The album leans on standards, which was always Garland's comfort zone. His touch is light but deliberate, and his block-chord style — something he helped popularize back in his Miles Davis Quintet days — still shows up here to good effect. The title track has that easy, rolling quality that made Garland so appealing in the first place. He never overcrowds a melody. There is space in his playing, and he uses it well rather than filling every bar with notes to show off.
What makes this worth tracking down is less about any single jaw-dropping moment and more about consistency. Garland was a pianist who made difficult things sound easy, and this late-career session captures that quality intact. It is not his most celebrated work — that belongs to his Blue Note and Prestige recordings from the 1950s — but it holds up as a solid, enjoyable record from someone who clearly still loved playing. Sometimes that is enough, and here it genuinely is.
