Album Notes

Over a long career Patrick Gleeson has been a musician's musician. Wendy Carlos wrote about Gleeson’s first album, Beyond the Sun: "Patrick Gleeson's grasp of color--orchestral, textural, infinitely elastic shades of subtle greys and contrasts between families of timbre is simply stunning.” After Gleeson played on Herbie Hancock’s Crossings, Hancock said, “What I heard just blew me away. As soon as I could afford it I asked him to join my band." The group soon produced a landmark of contemporary jazz, Sextant, with groundbreaking electronic orchestrations and improvisations by Gleeson on a variety of synths.
While Gleeson’s work is probably better known in hard-bop and electronic music areas, his music also had important roots in an entirely different community, where he was an early member of the composers' group who worked in and around The Mills College Tape Music Center in Oakland, musicians like Morton Sobotnik, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. Gleeson performed briefly with Reich's group on the West Coast, and together he and Terry Riley scored Bruce Conner's monumental underground film Crossroads.
What does Slide sound like? It has elements from all of Gleeson’s musical sources and sounds a little bit like Miles Davis playing Debussy orchestrated by Steve Reich. But most of all, it's just a beautiful almost cinematic musical journey. The other players joining Gleeson are Tower of Power’s Mark Russo on winds, Peter Manau (Jon Luc Ponty, LA Express, etc.) on guitar, and The Kronos Quartet’s Joan Jeanrenaud on cello. Gleeson plays piano, some percussion and a variety of synths.