Album Notes

As on the first Jazzed Media album, Fast Track, the Sound Check musicians are among the leading artists in New York's intersecting jazz and studio communities.

• Jack Cortner is true to himself. He writes the way he wants, expressing exactly what he feels about the music. Jack knows how to capture his feelings and put them on paper and how to elicit his music from the band. The tunes include jazz classics from Herbie Hancock and Duke Ellington, standards from Gershwin, Weill, Kern, Dietz, and Porter and two blues compositions of Cortner's.

• He is a great arranger, and this band of New York's finest musicians loves playing his music. Jazz soloists include Jim Pugh, Bill Mays, Jon Gordon, Dave Tofani and John Riley. The band is very sensitive to what Jack writes because, no matter what he writes, it just feels good!

• Trumpeter Marvin Stamm states, "The band loves playing Jack’s music because his orchestrations line up so beautifully. The charts feel great and sound great, so everybody looks forward to playing them. The musicians come in with a wonderful, positive attitude and really give it their all every time. I feel that Sound Check is an even more exciting CD than Fast Track - and that's saying something!"