Erroll Garner: Penthouse Serenade as heard in Woody Allen's <i>Mighty Aphrodite</i> (1995)

One mark of a great jazz artist is the ability to make a standard his or her own. By that yardstick, and by any other as well, Erroll Garner was a great jazz artist. Atop his habitual left-hand 4-to-the-bar chording (most reminiscent of Count Basie's perennial rhythm guitarist, Freddie Green), Garner's bubbly tremolos guide listeners through a melody with the attentiveness and fertile imagination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge touring Xanadu. Garner's patented "Penthouse Serenade" is entrancing, as elfin Erroll courts his high-rise sweetheart. For the hopeless romantic in us all, Erroll Garner shall ever be a stately pleasure-gnome.