Lots of folks in the country music streets of Nashville and the jazz canyons of New York were shaken up by this release, for country supersession man
Hank Garland demonstrated that he could be just as persuasive rattling off swift, sophisticated bebop as he was playing thousands of country licks on the jukeboxes. Nothing fazes him, not even the tricky "Move," for
Garland had technique to burn and a thoroughly modern harmonic approach. Not only that, a 17-year-old Boston kid named
Gary Burton makes an astonishingly brash and assured recorded debut on vibes on this record, and bassist Joe Benjamin and
the Dave Brubeck Quartet's unquenchably swinging drummer
Joe Morello (who had toured with
Garland when
Garland was a teenager) are on hand from New York. This record seemed to promise great things ahead for
Garland in the jazz world, a prospect cut sadly short later in 1961 by a crippling auto accident. Originally recorded in Nashville by Columbia and country & western producer Don Law (another shock to the purists' systems),
Jazz Winds has been in print in some form almost continuously. ~ Richard S. Ginell