Recording history and tape provenance
Local promoter Jimmy Lyons had launched a Monday-night jazz series at Carmel's Sunset School as an experiment. It went on to lay the groundwork for the Monterey Jazz Festival a few years later.
Garner's trio played the venue on an off-night from a San Francisco nightclub engagement, arriving relaxed from the drive down the Pacific Coast Highway. Servicemen bused in from Fort Ord swelled the audience.
Nobody from Columbia thought the show worth documenting. The tape rolled only because an Armed Forces Radio Network DJ named Will Thornbury wanted a single broadcast for servicemen at Fort Ord.
Thornbury secured Garner's manager Martha Glaser's permission on condition she got the tape back. Glaser reportedly held the reel on her lap for the whole flight to New York rather than risk it as checked luggage.
Garner never announced tunes and rarely played a standard as written. His "I'll Remember April" may be the only recorded version to treat the song in AABA form rather than its usual ABA structure.
Glaser recognised what she had, and producer George Avakian turned it into an album rather than let it circulate only as a broadcast recording.
What the source tape is
The recording came from a single microphone feeding a radio broadcast. Columbia itself described the auditorium as acoustically poor, with a piano somewhat out of tune.
No genuine multi-microphone stereo mix of this concert has ever existed. Anything sold as stereo is a reprocessing of that mono tape.
That limitation is in the source, so no pressing escapes it. Owners describe the original as fresh and crisp for a mono recording of this vintage, while inherently narrow in soundstage.
The 2015 restoration
For the album's 60th anniversary the Erroll Garner Jazz Project, with pianist Geri Allen and producer Steve Rosenthal, located and restored the complete concert tape. They applied the Plangent Process to correct speed inconsistencies inherent to the original recording.
In his account of the project, Rosenthal explains why the material survived in one place. Garner had a cantankerous relationship with his labels. Much of what he recorded was returned to him and Glaser rather than staying in label vaults.
That archive spanned nine separate storage facilities in Manhattan, holding over 1,700 tapes across cassettes, two-track and four-track reels, plus thousands of photographs. It covered Garner's career from 1937 to a recording of his final show.
The Complete Concert by the Sea, released on September 18, 2015, roughly doubled the available material. It adds eleven tunes, stage announcements and a post-concert interview with the trio, alongside a remastered version of the original programme.
Original Columbia pressing (1955)
CL 883 is mono, on Columbia's red and black six-eye label. Some sources cite early 1956 for wider distribution.
The album sold enormously, passing a million dollars in retail sales by 1958, gold-record territory by the standards of the day though never formally certified. Columbia repressed it steadily for years, and later 1960s and 1970s label variants of the same mono mix circulate.
Near-mint originals stay affordable relative to rarer period jazz titles, because the runs were very large.
Matrix suffix numbers give a rough sense of how many generations a copy sits from the original lacquer. One collector account describes a six-eye mono original with runouts ending 1C on side one and 1A on side two, among the earliest stampers cut.
Lower suffix numbers generally indicate an earlier run, though this is not exact across Columbia's pressing plants.
The Complete Concert by the Sea (2015)
The 2015 vinyl edition, catalogue 8875139881, is a 2×180g gatefold set. It presents an expanded selection from the rediscovered tape rather than the exact 11-track original programme.
Because the 1955 recording is mono, this edition applies a processed stereo presentation to add spatial separation to bass and drums. Reception is mixed but broadly positive about the intent, with one owner calling it a decent job of adding back the drums and bass.
Another owner on the same page finds it short of bass and drums against the original Columbia pressing. The same review credits it with by far the most detailed presentation of the piano.
This is a different listening experience from the mono original rather than an upgrade to it.
Pressings to avoid
Columbia CS 9821 from 1969 is an electronically rechannelled fake-stereo pressing of the mono original, and not a sound-quality upgrade.
The same collector comparison found a copy of it noticeably sped up against the mono original, a second fault beyond the rechannelling. Its runouts end 4B and 4D, a later-generation stamper.
No bootleg is widely documented. Glaser's securing the master tape from Thornbury was explicitly done to prevent unofficial circulation.
Buyer's guide by budget
$: A clean original Columbia mono CL 883, attainable given the scale of the pressing runs.
$$: The Complete Concert by the Sea 2LP, for the expanded programme rather than better sound.
Pressing tier summary
| Tier ⇅ | Pressing | Cat# | Year ⇅ | Format | Source / Mastering | Notes | Market ⇅ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B | Columbia original, six-eye | CL 883 | 1955 | Mono, 33⅓ | Original single-microphone radio recording | Attainable given the large runs. Earliest stampers show 1A and 1C runout suffixes | $38VG+ $50NM $56M |
| B | The Complete Concert by the Sea | 8875139881 | 2015 | Processed stereo, 33⅓, 2×180g | Rediscovered tape, Plangent Process remaster | Expanded programme. More detailed piano, less bass and drums per one review | $64VG+ $83NM $93M |
| C | Columbia later label variants | CL 883 | 1960s–70s | Mono, 33⅓ | Same metalwork lineage | Budget option | – |
| F | Columbia rechannelled stereo | CS 9821 | 1969 | Rechannelled stereo, 33⅓ | Reprocessed from the mono original | Not a stereo recording. One copy also noticeably sped up | $12VG+ $15NM $17M |
| – | Philips 7" EP (UK) | BBE 12184 | 1958 | Mono, 45rpm, 7" | Not credited | Not rated, not an album pressing. Three tracks | – |
References
- Discogs (master, all versions): https://www.discogs.com/master/179454-Erroll-Garner-Concert-By-The-Sea
- Wikipedia, "Concert by the Sea": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_by_the_Sea
- Jazz History Online, "Erroll Garner: The Complete 'Concert by the Sea'": https://jazzhistoryonline.com/concert-by-the-sea/
- It's A Raggy Waltz, "Concert By The Sea // Erroll Garner": https://raggywaltz.com/2017/04/05/concert-by-the-sea-erroll-garner/
- Erroll Garner official channel, "Steve Rosenthal, Co-Producer 'The Complete Concert By The Sea'": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoBc2UqZmpo