Michael Garrick – Voyages: The Argo Studio Albums Vol. 1 (with Norma Winstone) (PRE-ORDER)

Released 6 November. PRE-ORDER NOW!

The Heart Is A Lotus (1970)

Mr Smith’s Apocalypse (1971)

Home Stretch Blues (1972)

Troppo (1974)

Originally released on the Decca Argo Records imprint, each album in this limited edition 4-LP set is reissued on vinyl for the very first time. Remastering is all-analogue, direct from the original stereo master tapes at Abbey Road. The edition, marking the 15th anniversary of Garrick’s passing in 2011, includes original album art and is accompanied by a 20pp booklet with liner notes by award-winning writer Stuart Nicholson and an introduction by Tony Higgins, photos and tape box images. Album photos include work by legendary photographer Mick Rock.

The recordings feature some of the cream of British jazz artists of the period, including Art Themen, Coleridge Goode, Dave Green, Don Rendell, Henry Lowther, Ian Carr, and Trevor Tomkin. Plus, of course, Norma Winstone, who is featured on all four albums.

Since the early 1960s, as well as having its own identity within the jazz genre, Garrick’s music has explored spoken word, poetry, and choral works too, and over the years he composed and performed in small & big band settings.

His collaborators and band members in the past included the Jamaican-born, British-based pioneering free-form saxophonist and composer Joe Harriott, Vincentian jazz musician and poet Shake Keane, jazz-free-thinker and Nucleus founder Ian Carr, jazz modernist Don Rendell, and the much-celebrated queen of “Jazz Britannia” — vocalist and lyricist Norma Winstone.