Today we present two piano instrumentals that explore the mysteries of Mist. Strictly speaking, a “mist” can be defined by some water vapor that obscures your vision, but how many more evocative instances can you think of where a mist appears in a story or film, usually preceding an arrival of some spiritual manifestation? There was a video game called “Myst” (spelled with a Y) which featured a series of puzzles saturated with a heady whiff of the arcane. Your sight is always obscured; your emotional restlessness is never assuaged.

Erroll Garner and Bix Beiderbecke were two jazz titans writing compositions separated by 30 years that hint at this other-worldly quality inherent in the idea of the Mist. Their music excites the senses and tugs at the heart simultaneously; it’s music that lifts off and keeps insinuating an urge to maintain altitude in an unresolved quest for landing, but never deciding on a perch.

ERROLL GARNER

Most of you probably know Johnny Mathis’s version of Misty, with lyrics by Johnny Burke, that was a monster hit of 1959, but Erroll Garner wrote the song as an instrumental 5 years earlier, on a plane flight to Chicago’s OHare airport, after seeing a rainbow through the airplane window. That’s a fitting image for the complicated feelings invoked here: a glimpse of hope through tears.

Influenced by Earl Hines, Garner played with spontaneous timing changes, liquidy octaval melodies, and improvised chordal voicings, and his contribution to jazz evolution was to reconcile the gap between BeBop spontaneity and Orchestral formalism. His style was so free that he was dubbed “the happy man” because this joy he exuded was so palpable. Misty was concocted from the eternal music of the spheres - maybe because his feet were not on the ground when he composed it.

BIX BEIDERBECKE

The comet of Bix Beiderbecke’s talent was a mystery in itself: dead from alcohol in 1931 at the age of 28, his cornet style and compositional originality continues to fascinate almost 100 years later. A self taught musician, Bix appeared from podunk Iowa and immediately became a ragtime sensation at the height of the Jazz era with The Wolverines, then with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra (along with Bing Crosby). He was a white man playing a traditionally black form of music, which was a novelty, and that made him easier to market to middle America - but such genius is color blind.

Although renowned for his horn playing, he composed In a Mist on piano in 1927 (he was 24), and it’s here that you see the influence of the impressionist composer Claude Debussy, the creator of such sensuous works as Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and La Mer. Is this Jazz? How did he do it? Clearly, Bix was in touch with mystical forces beyond human understanding, or maybe, like Robert Johnson, he just made a deal with the devil. Either way, the spiritual quest suggested by these chord changes transports us into a misty continent of emotional confusion.