Before Garrison landed the Coltrane gig, he'd been making his way through the New York scene in the early 1960s, playing with Ornette Coleman and Bill Evans, among others. That range tells you something — he was comfortable in freer contexts but could also hold his own in more structured, harmonically rich settings. He wasn't a one-trick player, which is probably why Coltrane hired him in 1961 and kept him for the rest of his life.

What Garrison actually did inside the Coltrane quartet is harder to describe than it sounds. Elvin Jones was playing these enormous, rolling rhythms that didn't always land on the beat the way you'd expect, and McCoy Tyner was stacking up fourths and modal voicings that left a lot of harmonic space deliberately unresolved. Garrison's job was to be the thing everyone else could locate themselves against. He used long, arching bass lines — sometimes almost melodic, sometimes more like pedal points — that gave the music a floor without boxing anyone in. On A Love Supreme (1964), you can hear exactly what that means: the bass isn't just keeping time, it's providing a kind of gravitational pull.

He was also one of the first jazz bassists to make serious use of the bow in a non-classical context, and he could play unaccompanied passages that held their own without the band behind him. His solo introduction on A Love Supreme (1964) is a good example — unhurried, confident, nothing flashy about it. He wasn't trying to impress you with technique. He was just playing what the music needed.

After Coltrane died in 1967, Garrison kept working — he played with Alice Coltrane for a period and did various other sessions — but he never quite found another context that matched what he'd had with the quartet. That's not a knock on him; the Coltrane group was a singular thing, and most musicians who were part of it found the years after to be something of an adjustment. Garrison died in 1976 from lung cancer, which cut short whatever he might have done next. He was forty-one.

If you're coming to Garrison fresh, the obvious entry point is the Coltrane quartet recordings. A Love Supreme (1964) is the one everyone knows, but Live at Birdland (1964) and Crescent (1964) are worth equal attention. He's never the loudest thing in the room on any of these records, but try to follow the bass line specifically for a few minutes and you'll start to hear how much of what makes those records feel so locked-in is coming from him.