Album Notes

If Joe Levey had lived to hear this album, I'm sure he would be pleased with how well "Cool Joe" turned out. I wish we could hear his trumpet on it.

After I contacted Maysa Leak about recording her song "Shadows and the the Light", I hit pay-dirt by getting Bridget Sullivan to do the vocal. The Anchorage Daily News referred to her as the best singer in the Anchorage area. That's why she was a featured singer in Tom Lambert's jazz group and had the lead role in Evita which was presented at the Anchorage Performing Arts Center.

The Russian singer, Leo Grinberg, moved from Magadan, Russia to the USA, specifically so he could sing American songs. He sings the blues like he invented the stuff as you'll see on this recording of "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know". He asked me to play sax behind him on this piece performed at a concert at the Anchorage Performing Arts Center.

My son, a police officer who's designation is "K-2", likes medium-tempo blues shuffles. So naturally I created this 12-bar blues piece I call "12 Bars for K-2".

Frank Iarossi, guitarist, drummer, vocalist, sound engineer, and familiar face around the Anchorage music scene did thumbs-up work on this recording of "Moondance".

My younger son was a guitarist for a while and way back-in-the-day when I created the melody for this piece that we put together: "Copious Moping". It's a real roof-top at 3:00 in the morning, blowing over a sleeping city, dismal-rain-on-a-fire-escape type of tune.

Keyboardist, vocalist, and arranger, Rod Masters, did the body of engineering and played on most of the tracks here. My hat goes off to this patient man.

Spoken arts used to be an integral part of the jazz scene back before beatniks transitioned into hippies. The dark, smokey coffee houses sporting pictures of James Dean and Dylan Thomas featured readings much like what is on this album. Recorded live at the "Out North Theater" in Anchorage, the poems "The Sailor and the Whore" and "Genesis on a Book Shelf" were taken from the my poetry/essay book "Lazarus on a Spur Line". So was the last reading on the CD "A Few Yards Short of a Poem".