Album Notes

Joel Forrester is a pianist, composer and bandleader who has been composing and performing extraordinary music for nearly thirty years. He has written some 1,100 compositions - including the theme for the National Public radio program Fresh Air with Terry Gross. And Joel has performed in the United States, Europe and Canada as a solo pianist, as the leader of his own groups and as the co-founder and co-leader of the acclaimed Microscopic Septet.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Joel lived in San Francisco where he composed ragtime music, played in jazz ensembles and accompanied silent film under the name Doctor Real. He and his wife Mary moved to New York in 1973. His first gigs in the city were playing rags and boogie-woogie. He was soon also playing many bebop piano gigs.

In 1975 and 1976, Joel studied composition with Thelonious Monk in sessions arranged by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswater. Work with Monk deepened his concentration as a performer and set him stubbornly at finding a personal idiom as a composer. Monk told him, "You can play!" Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, Forrester led a variety of groups that included: bassist David Hofstra, who has been a keystone of many of the best and most vital bands; legendary one-time Ellington sideman, saxophonist Lucky Ennett; drummer Denis Charles, who was to remain his drummer for 23 years; and soprano saxophonist Phillip Johnston with whom Joel led one of the most influential bands of the 1980s.

In 1981, Johnston and Forrester co-founded the Microscopic Septet which, in its 12-year career, played major festivals and toured Europe and Canada extensively. "The group reached its deepest moments," says Forrester, "during periodic skeins of weekly gigs at forgotten New York jazz clubs." The septet recorded four albums including Take The Z Train, reissued in 1998 on KOCH Jazz (KOC-CD-7863).

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Forrester played in a wide variety of settings with such notables as saxophonist Bobby Watson, bassists Earl May, John Ore and Lindsay Horner, and drummers Bobby Previte, Walter Perkins, Kevin Norton and Beaver Harris.

In 1990, the Microscopic Septet recorded Forrester's theme and incidental music for the National Public Radio program Fresh Air, music which is still being played every weekday for this most popular show.

When the septet dissolved in 1992, Forrester took his family to Paris where he established himself as a leading improviser to silent film, playing at such venues as the Musee d'Orsay and the Videotheque de Paris. Since that time, Joel has often been invited back to play at those places and also at the Louvre, the Centre Pompidou and the American Centre.

Re-established in New York in 1994, Joel and baritone saxophonist Claire Daly (formerly of the Diva Big band) formed a new working group People Like Us. With bassist Dave Hofstra and drummer Denis Charles the group became the house band at several New York clubs, played the Ottawa Jazz festival and initiated a recording relationship with Koch Jazz that has produced three albums - No ...Really!, In Heaven and Believe It. Koch Jazz, whose director Donald Elfman was personally introduced to Forrester's music by Fresh Air's Terry Gross, has also released a solo piano disc Stop The Music, which was co-sponsored by Fresh Air and recorded at the program's studio in Philadelphia, Pa. In 1999 Koch issued a 1981 recording Joel Forrester And The Illustrious Others which finds Joel in the company of many of his favorite companions including Phillip Johnston, Lucky Ennett and Dave Hofstra.

Joel Forrester continues to work with People Like Us, in smaller units, and as a solo artist. He's rightly proud of his reputation as a musician who concentrates on his own compositions and finds places to play them.

Ever Wonder Why is Joel's first new recording in 5 years. In addition to ten tunes for the quartet featuring star soloist Claire Daly on baritone saxophone, there is a special piece that Joel wrote - and recorded witha handful of friends - about September 11.