Garnering Erroll’s Universe of Things
This post was written by YuHao Chen, graduate student in ethnomusicology, University of Pittsburgh.
On January 2nd, 1977, as he was making his way to the hospital, famed jazz pianist Erroll Garner collapsed in the lobby of his apartment building in Beverly Hills, California. Garner died of lung cancer, a condition that had significantly interfered with his performance career since 1975. His death stirred ripples of attention across the jazz world. Condolences resounded among his admirers. Deeply felt words, especially those from within his intimate circle, were expressed in gravity. Martha Glaser, Garner’s manager who championed his career for nearly three decades, confided later that month to his neighbor Beatrice Glass, “I am too weary to say much—except to thank you.” Gratitude, sorrow, and silence were mortared onto paper-thin records following Garner’s passing.
Image from folder “Erroll Garner Estate,” Erroll Garner Archive, 1942-2010, Box 3, Folder 22, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Amidst these heavy, withheld sentiments was a little-known agitation that occurred in Garner’s apartment two days after his death. On January 4th, as his body was being transported under his brother Linton’s supervision from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh, a ruckus broke out surrounding a quotidian collection of items at 815 S. Shenandoah, Apartment 203. They were moved, shuffled, picked over, turned, unsettled for an unknown duration, only to be duly rearranged—at the very end—onto an itemized list. Over the next several months, the inventory would develop in size and detail, forming an initial basis for what would become the Erroll Garner estate.
The preliminary inventory compiled on January 4th, 1977 offers a glimpse into Garner’s habitat during the final hours of his life. Written with two different pens—one taking the initial round of survey, the other specifying the quantities of items and missing details—this document is preserved in the Erroll Garner Archive as a photocopied record, with a subtle folded line cleaving the phrase “1,200 cassette tapes.” This list represents the very first, albeit incomplete, look at the physical environment Garner left behind.
Image from folder “Erroll Garner Estate,” Erroll Garner Archive, 1942-2010, Box 3, Folder 22, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.
While we do not know who penned the inventory, later correspondence from Martha Glaser suggests that the task of handling Garner’s personal belongings and incoming mails was shared among a group of people. For the remainder of 1977, these orphaned objects were looked after by Garner’s neighbor Beatrice Glass, his sister Ruth Garner Moore, realtor Ursula Fox, attorneys Howard E. Lowe and Sidney Horvitz, and Glaser herself, among others.
The cataloging effort continued into April that year. The April 16th inventory, which took three days for two attorneys and Garner’s sister to complete, is a comprehensive documentation of Garner’s California dwelling. Spanning nine neatly typed pages, it enumerates items from all his living quarters: the den (with separate sections on the desk, credenza, and closet), patio, living room, dining room (and cabinets), kitchen, linen closet, hall closet, bedroom, and master bathroom. In addition, there is an inventory of Garner’s wardrobe compiled by his sister. Per Glaser’s request, Ruth also made annotations and underlined watches, rings, clocks, and cameras—possibly to indicate the more expensive items on the list.
As a whole, this litany of things articulates the thickness of life. The five-drawer desk in the den, for example, would surely not have taken up more space than the entire living room. Yet the desk items sprawl over three pages in the inventory; the items from the living room, on the other hand, occupy less than one. Over sixty desk items are recorded, some inconspicuously small (a pair of piano key cuff-links), others delicately light (an autographed photo from Sonny Stitt). Although the inventory does not tell us about the precise spatial arrangement of Garner’s apartment, it provides an array of objects with which we may imagine different possibilities.
Image from folder “Erroll Garner Estate,” Erroll Garner Archive, 1942-2010, Box 3, Folder 22, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.
In a literal sense, the objects included in the January and April inventories were some of the last witnesses and liaisons to Garner’s still living body—they shared the same air before he left the door for the hospital, endured the same physical space and overlapping histories. Garner’s presence is made vivid by the functionality of these items. They bear the traces of his final imprint, like the unattended clay that retains the shape of a long-departed palm.
With Garner’s passing, the stuff around him comes alive. His constellation of things, previously tucked away in the Shenandoah apartment, surfaces in the texture of the catalog. Through changing hands, they are indexed, appraised, negotiated, stored, sold, shipped, unboxed. As Garner’s deceased body made its homeward journey to Pittsburgh on January 4th, his belongings simultaneously took flight, beginning to pulse through various phases of inventory and, for some, preservation.
Glaser took part in orchestrating the afterlife of Garner’s belongings. Through the end of 1980, if not later, she worked scrupulously to handle and breathe new life into these inanimate things. One can only imagine the difficulty of managing the inventories from a distance. As Glaser perused these catalogs in her office in New York—anxiously, perhaps, having neither the luxury of taking her own inventory on site nor the whim of abandoning the objects on the West Coast—she had to rely on her distant collaborators. As much as she might like to look over their shoulders, Glaser’s vision was guided by the ways in which they scanned and parsed Garner’s estate. Through their organizational schema, Garner’s belongings were transformed into a table of contents, to be delivered and presented to Glaser as metadata. What Glaser was reading, in effect, was a finding aid.
After all, what is a finding aid but a catalog of things that were summoned, scrutinized, skipped over, and split? Some of Garner’s belongings were likely sold in estate sales, others stored in the archives, still others permanently lost, only to be found as names in the inventories. And these documents, as archived objects themselves, exist in yet another catalog of items within the Garner Archive. Listing, cataloging, and finding—these are gestures embedded in the very appearance of Garner’s things. Thanks to archival realism, objects can be brought into brief communion through finding aids before coming apart again. The January and April inventories, in particular, provide a frozen frame for delineating an ecology for the Garner Space and the Garner Body, a physical coherence that nonetheless disintegrates into a sea of records the moment we try to retrieve it. Affixed to a finding aid, Garner’s corpus of things cannot help but hide behind its own archival skin, ultimately remaining an index of 1977.
