THE BIRTH OF A BANDLEADER
THE GENESIS
I began piano lessons at age ten but had no interest in practicing. I took lessons for six months. Later, in my twenties, I took another six months from Seattle jazz great, Jerry Gray. After that, I studied music at the University of Washington, mostly self-taught on piano.
First exposure to music in school included:
Played string bass in the fifth and sixth grades
Played bass and also started to learn euphonium (baritone horn) in the seventh grade.
Played tuba (same fingering as baritone) in the high school band in the eighth grade. They needed tuba players. It’s pretty easy to play tuba if the music is simple.
Also played baritone horn in the ninth grade but that year my interest in music was transformed by a movie, the “Glenn Miller Story” so I decided to learn how to play the saxophone.
Aunts, uncles and four-part harmony booming through the thin walls of my bedroom when I was a young boy in the Forties. My mother played piano by ear and I grew up hearing those great old Tin Pan Ally tunes. At about 14 I sold my coin collection and bought a Kay bass at one of the Seattle hock shops on first Avenue. My first experiences as a paid musician was as as a bass player. I remember my first paid gig was with the Chuck Heatley Orchestra at the University of Puget Sound. I was15. It wasn’t long before I started my own band and quickly realized that if I was going to be a bandleader it would be better for me to be working out front as a horn player, so I went back to the hock shops and found a tenor sax. I was fortunate to dial myself in for lessons with Johnny Jesson who was, at that time, seattle’s preeminent teacher of reed instruments. It wasn’t long before I purchased a brand new Selmer alto sax, and a Selmer clarinet as well. I learned quickly and was able to play the charts I was buying during my sophomore year in high school. Every dollar that I could get my hands on went for the purchase of big band orchestrations at Ted Brown music. By the time I graduated from high school I had quite a library and was working regularly with my band.
As a young man himself in the early sixties (born 1939), Garrett was unfazed by the impending decline in opportunities for dance bands. Instead, he attacked the music business like a military campaign, studying what the established bands were playing, noting audience response; all the while launching a frontal assault on the local scene that quickly had the Garrett Orchestra—from seven to thirteen pieces—slipping in to many of the old-timers’ gigs.
“I was twelve years old when I saw ‘The Glenn Miller Story’,” Garrett reminisces, “and my reaction was: ‘Wow! I’m gonna be a bandleader!’ My mother played the piano and everybody in my family sang, so I had music all around me when I was young. In sixth grade I began playing string bass; I don’t remember taking lessons, I just sort of picked it up. When I got into high school I decided I really was going to be a bandleader, so I bought a tenor sax at a hockshop and began studying with Johnnie Jessen, and later with Ronald Phillips (who was the principal clarinetist in the Seattle Symphony at the time).
“At age fifteen I started my own band, and within a couple of years I was getting a lot of gigs. I led two bands in the late fifties: the George Haviland Sextet —‘George Haviland’ was me—and the Burke Garrett Orchestra, the big band. The sextet played a lot of head charts. My slogan was ‘jazz for dancing.’”
My commitment to the music business kept growing by leaps and bounds. By the time I got to the University of Washington in September 1957 I was getting more and more work for the band. In the winter of 1958, we were playing many of the formal homecomings, proms and functions for the fraternities and sororities at the UW, PLU and University of Puget Sound. Through an aggressive process of trial and error I continued to learn more and more about being the leader of a dance band and, out of necessity, I quickly became adept at marketing and sales. I liked selling my band and selling myself.