Liner notes by David R. Halliday

My Favorite Saxophonist

Liner notes by nature are an exercise in advocacy. No matter how coldly 

dispassionate their tone - no matter how assiduously their writer might try 

to eschew the persona of cheerleader, to posture instead as the serious and 

objective critic - the time and energy devoted to their creation carry the 

inescapable implication: the musicians who made this album are worth reading 

about, their music worth hearing. This inherent advocacy, I’m afraid, will 

be doubly pronounced in the present case, David Stuart Halliday being my only 

son. But if you think the following unabashedly biased comments make me 

sound like a cheerleader, you ought to hear his mother talk about him.

When I questioned David’s decision to have his dad write these notes, he told 

me that I was the logical choice because I was more familiar with his musical 

development than anyone outside himself. On the whole, I suppose that's 

true, so I'll begin there.

A popular notion maintains that human beings begin their musical development 

in the womb. If that’s true, David's began quietly, in early 1973, with the 

pastoral sounds of the countryside – wind through oaks, bullfrogs in 

irrigation ditches, horses and cattle in their corrals - augmented by the 

widely eclectic but predominantly classical mix of music that came through 

the speakers of the stereo in the house my wife, Jill, and I rented on a 

ranch outside Davis, California from 1972 to 1975.

I'd been listening to “modern” jazz since my high school days back in Salt 

Lake City, in the late fifties, when I'd tune in faithfully to Wes Bowen's 

invaluable evening radio show on KSL. So a considerable portion of the music 

that David heard while still in the womb consisted of Bill Evans, Erroll 

Garner, Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Junior Mance, Stan Getz, and the Modern 

Jazz Quartet, along with some sixties and early seventies rock (favorites 

included The Band, Bob Dylan, and Leon Russell), and a diverse miscellany of 

artists ranging from Ravi Shankar to Frank Sinatra to Lightnin’ Hopkins to 

Flatt and Scruggs.

But the bucolic atmosphere of the place - where we could step out our 

backdoor, walk a few paces, sit under an olive tree, breathe the fresh 

country air, look out across miles of open fields, and watch the sun set 

behind distant purple hills - lent itself to the enjoyment of the music of 

Palestrina, Schütz, Vivaldi, Teleman, Bach, Handel, Hayden, Mozart, 

Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler, and that is what we played most of the time 

that we were there. We also attended performances by the Sacramento and San 

Francisco Symphonies, but the high point of our listening came in Jill's 

eighth month of pregnancy when, from the third row of the Flint Center for 

the Performing Arts, we witnessed an awesome performance of Beethoven’s Fifth 

by the Chicago Symphony, under the baton of Georg Solti. David must have 

liked it, as he responded by being born on the late maestro's birthday, 

October 21 - also the birthday of the great tenor saxophonist, Don Byas, and 

of Dizzy Gillespie, with whom David was destined to share the stage and swap 

solos at the Monterey Jazz Festival, nineteen years later.

About the time David turned four, I took him to a Sunday morning drum 

workshop, presented by Max Roach, at Keystone Korner, San Francisco's late, 

great, North Beach jazz club. Max explained that a drummer didn't need a 

truckload of equipment to make good music and, to prove his point, picked up 

a drumstick and proceeded to play an entire piece, using only that stick and 

his hi-hat. David was mesmerized. When the piece ended and the applause 

began, he turned to me and said, "I want a hi-hat."

Eventually we got him his hi-hat, along with a snare, a tom, a kick-drum and 

a ride cymbal, and formed a family band with Jill at the piano and me walking 

simple lines on electric bass. About the time he turned six, he began taking 

piano lessons - which he hated. I could understand why, after suffering 

through one of his recitals. His teacher seemed to think that making music 

consisted simply in playing a series of notes in the proper sequence, 

apparently unaware of the fact that "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got 

that swing." All her students played the proper sequences of notes, but 

their time - their time was like an endangered species rapidly being driven 

to extinction by her preoccupation with playing the proper sequence of 

pitches. I told David that he could quit his piano lessons with that teacher 

if he'd take lessons from me - an offer he readily accepted. These lessons 

pretty much dispensed with sheet music, consisting instead of simple 

twelve-bar blues exercises, with me standing over him beating out steady 

four-to-the-bar time on my guitar and singing the lyrics of Jimmy Reed, 

Willie Dixon, and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. Whatever this approach lacked – 

and, admittedly, it lacked plenty - it solidified his natural sense of time 

and allowed him to internalize the twelve-bar form so common in the history 

of jazz.

Besides good time, David has always had "big ears." By the time he was 

seven, he'd heard numerous recordings by tenor saxophonists - Coleman 

Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Don Byas, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, 

Stan Getz, etc. - and I'd often tell him the name of the saxophonist who 

happened to be playing on the stereo. One day, I brought home a new reissue 

of Coleman Hawkins recordings from the mid-thirties. I put the record on and 

was listening to Hawk soloing on "The Day You Came Along," when David 

sauntered out of his room, pointed to the speakers, and announced with 

perfect confidence, "Coleman Hawkins."

After our first trip to see Max Roach, I often took David to hear live jazz 

at San Francisco venues like Keystone Korner or the Great American Music 

Hall. Before entering junior high, he’d enjoyed the atmosphere of intimate 

jazz clubs, listening to live performances by Paquito D'Rivera, Tete 

Montoliu, Toshiko Akyoshi, Stan Getz, Elvin Jones, Tito Puente, Dexter 

Gordon, Phil Woods, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Dave McKenna, Scott Hamilton, Betty 

Carter, Sarah Vaughan, Shelly Mann, and Jimmy Rowles.

By the fourth grade, David had begun playing clarinet, switching to alto sax 

a couple of years later. At age fourteen, through the connections of two 

fine San Francisco musicians, bassist Bill Langlois and pianist Melanie 

Jones, David was introduced to the late Joe Henderson, who agreed to take him 

as a student after hearing a tape David had recorded of "Jeep's Blues." For 

the next year and a half, until David was old enough to drive, I'd drive him, 

every week or two, to Joe's huge San Francisco home, overlooking the South 

Bay. Joe told me that the charge for his instruction would be forty dollars 

an hour, but he never charged more than forty dollars a lesson, some of which 

lasted three hours. I once tried to pay him for the extra hours but he 

rebuffed my efforts, explaining that his teaching was its own reward, "like 

planting trees." Besides, he said that David was a particularly enjoyable 

student because he soaked up Joe's instruction "like a little sponge."

David played his first paying gig on his fifteenth birthday, in San Jose, 

with transplanted New Yorkers, avante garde trumpeter and Cecil Taylor/Sun Ra 

alumnus Eddie Gale, and singer, flautist, and bebop raconteur Mr. B., and 

Philly organ colossus Chet Smith. During the next four years, David took up 

the tenor saxophone and gigged regularly in the Bay Area and Sacramento, 

graduating from Vacaville High School (Vacaville California), where his saxophone 

section mates included fellow tenorist Teodross Avery (who has several jazz 

albums to his credit) and Phil O'Connor (who has since performed on clarinet 

in Carnegie Hall and is now active in the L.A. studio scene), and attending 

Solano Community College, where he studied with composer/keyboardist Delbert 

Bump. During these years, David frequented Bay Area jazz venues such as 

Kimball's, Kimball's East, and Yoshi's, where he persuaded headliners like 

Wynton Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, and Freddie Hubbard to allow him to sit in 

with their bands.

In fall of 1994, David headed to New Orleans for a semester at Loyola 

University, where he studied saxophone with Tony Dagradi and gigged regularly 

with the New Orleans funk band, Galactic, propelled by Stanton Moore's 

explosive drumming. 

Back in California in 1995, David resumed his studies at Solano College and 

gigged throughout northern California, until January of 1997, when he joined 

blues diva and Bay Area Music Award (Bammy) winner E.C. Scott's band, Smoke, 

for U.S. tours covering 44 states and a week of performances in Athens, 

Greece. He can be heard on E.C. Scott's CD Hard Act To Follow (Blind Pig 

Records), which received four-star ratings in both the S.F. Chronicle and 

Down Beat magazine, and climbed to #4 on the Living Blues magazine radio 

chart.

By 1998, Salt Lake City pianist and jazz promoter, Larry Jackstien had 

informed David of the opportunities available in BYU's fine jazz program, 

directed by multi-instrumentalist Ray Smith, whose main instrument is the 

alto saxophone and who directs BYU's award-winning big band, Synthesis. The 

following January, David left for Provo, Utah with a full scholarship. Since 

arriving there, in addition to taking classes and securing the first tenor 

chair in Synthesis, he's assumed a teaching assistantship, coaching jazz 

combos and directing the Lab Band, BYU's third-string big band, which he's 

renamed with the more inspiring title, the Duke Ellington Memorial Orchestra. 

He also co-leads the Westside Quintet, has acquired about thirty private 

saxophone students, and gigs an average of four or five times a week. Summer 

of 2000 he toured Europe with Synthesis, performing in five countries, 

including engagements at the World Expo in Hannover, Germany, the Umbria Jazz 

Festival in Perugia, Italy, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. 

This past summer he again toured with Synthesis, playing engagements on the 

Queen Elizabeth II, and in England. Among his Utah employers have been some 

of the state's finest musicians, including Sam Cardon, Mike Dowdle, Brett 

Raymond, Kelly Eisenhour, Jay Lawrence, Vince Frates, Steve Keen, Craig 

Larson, Dan Waldis, Ben Carson, Lars Yorgason, and Joe Muscolino. David has 

also become progressively more active in Utah's burgeoning studio scene, 

providing original music for radio and TV spots and supplying saxophone lines 

for projects at Non-Stop Productions.

Over the years David has won numerous musical awards and distinctions. 

Between 1988 and 1992 he garnered an Outstanding Musicianship Award at the 

Stanford University Summer Jazz Workshop, a First Place Combo Award at the 

Pacific Coast Collegiate Jazz Festival, and an Outstanding Soloist award from 

the California Association of Jazz Educators, as well as playing in the 

California State Honor Band, and securing the first alto saxophone chair with 

the Monterey Jazz Festival High School All-Stars (which provided him the 

opportunity to solo with Dizzy Gillespie on Thelonious Monk's "Round 

Midnight"). In 1996 he was named Outstanding College Instrumentalist at the 

Reno International Jazz Festival and, for three years running (1999-2001) has 

been named Outstanding Tenor Saxophone Soloist at the Lionel Hampton Jazz 

Festival in Moscow, Idaho, where he's also led the Outstanding College Combo 

for the past two years.

Inspiration for this, David's first album, came from a number of sources. 

The idea of using two guitarists in the rhythm section was prompted by 

David's admiration of Marc Johnson's Bass Desires albums for ECM, which 

feature guitarists John Scofield and Bill Frissell. In Kenji Aihara and 

Joshua Payne, with both of whom David has gigged often since arriving in 

Utah, he had heard the potential for the same sort of stylistic 

complementarity, but hadn't thought of recording an album with the two 

guitarists, until he heard then-eighteen-year old Seattle bassist, Michael 

Emswiler.

I'd gigged quite a bit with both Josh and Kenji and I loved the way both of 

them played. I fantasized about making an album with one or the other. And 

sometimes I'd think, 'I'd like to hear what those two would sound like 

playing together.' I mean, their styles are so different but they're both 

capable of adapting to any musical situation without sacrificing their 

uniqueness. But I didn't actually think of bringing them together in the 

studio until I heard Mike - the way he uses the bass's low notes to establish 

a deep groove, and that big sound . . . unamplified, he can fill a room with 

sound where other bassists would need to turn up their amps to be heard. And 

then there was the maturity of his conception . . . I could hardly believe he 

was still in high school. The first time we played together, I decided to 

schedule a recording session with him. When pondering who else to have on 

the date, I kept asking myself who'd sound good with Mike's bass and I tried 

to think of bands that built their sound around a distinctive bass style. 

When Marc Johnson's group, Bass Desires, popped into my mind, I thought of 

Kenji and Josh, and that was it . . . I knew exactly what I wanted to do. 

But Mike's playing was the catalyst.

To complete the rhythm section, David called his old Vacaville "homey" Alan 

U'Ren, with whom he'd been gigging in California for the past ten years or 

so. Then he secured the services of Nathan Botts, a featured soloist with 

Synthesis and co-leader (with David) of the Westside Quintet. David also 

invited his teacher and mentor, Ray Smith, to fall by the studio, if 

convenient, and sit in on a couple of tunes.

Much could be written in praise of all these musicians, but I'll content 

myself with a paragraph on each.

Guitarist Kenji Aihara was born in Hokkaido, Japan, September 3, 1971. He 

studied piano from the time he was in pre-school and took up the electric 

guitar when in junior high, initially to play rock but soon discovered and 

was drawn to the fusion of Chick Corea and Pat Metheny, whom he continues to 

cite as his major influences, and, like those two gifted players, Kenji is 

perfectly comfortable - and capable of creating considerable excitement - in 

a straight-ahead format. After high school, at the urging of people around 

him, Kenji decided to give up music - "there's no money in music, they said - 

and they were right" - to pursue a more "practical" profession, moving to the 

U.S. to study psychology. But that field didn't satisfy his need for 

creative self-expression and he switched his major to art (he'd been a 

formally-trained, prize-winning calligrapher in Japan). Still, fortunately 

for all of us, he couldn't break his music habit, began studying guitar and 

jazz theory with Mark Maxson, joined the Weber State Jazz Ensemble (directed 

by Don Keipp), and eventually changed his major again. He's presently 

pursuing a degree in classical guitar at Weber State College, while studying 

jazz privately with Lars Yorgason and Dan Waldis. Kenji has won awards at 

the Northwest, Reno, Lionel Hampton, and Fullerton College jazz festivals, 

and has performed with such internationally known jazz musicians as Marvin 

Stamm and Roy Hargrove.

Guitarist Joshua Payne was born on April 30, 1978, in American Fork, Utah. 

Upon hearing the Gene Harris Quartet for the first time, at age thirteen, he 

"fell instantly in love with jazz" and began learning to play it, earning a 

spot in Utah's All-State Jazz Ensemble four years in a row. While still in 

high school, he joined Brigham Young University's award-winning big band, 

Synthesis, and toured Europe with it, playing and recording at the Montreaux 

Jazz Festival. In contrast to what might be called Kenji's orchestral 

conception of the guitar, Joshua's approach tends toward angular, minimalist 

phrases, informed by a puckish sense of humor and a surprisingly mature 

conception of space, his idiosyncratic lines achieving some striking effects 

over the organ-like richness of Kenji's chords. Joshua has composed and 

arranged extensively for a ten-piece band, which he hopes to have "up and 

running soon in New York City," where he now resides. In the meantime, he 

says, look for him playing banjo in the NYC subway.

Bassist Michael Emswiler was born April 23, 1982 in Renton, Washington. 

Jazz, he says, has been the focus of his life for the past five years, during 

which he's studied with Ali Jackson (former drummer for Wynton Marsalis), 

Doug Miller (bass instructor at University of Washington and one of Seattle's 

top performing bassists), and Paul Harshman of Music Works Northwest. 

Michael is the recipient of numerous regional and national awards, including 

the Clifford/Brown/Stan Getz Fellowship and first place for two consecutive 

years in the Lional Hampton Jazz Festival's bass solo competition. He cites 

as his major musical influences John Coltrane, Christian McBride, and Dave 

Holland, expressing particular admiration for "their dedication, and the 

unique way they have pushed the boundaries of jazz." Since making this 

album, Michael has been called to serve as a missionary in Brazil for the 

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Alan U'ren, a second-generation jazz drummer (his father, Nick, also gigs on 

drums in the San Francisco-Sacramento area) was born on October 21 (same day 

of the year as David) in 1969 and began playing drums at age ten. By age 

eighteen, he was playing professionally, and before turning twenty became the 

house drummer at the Silverado Country Club in Northern California's "Wine 

Country" - a gig he still holds, the security of which (rare in the 

experience of jazz musicians) allowed him to attend Sonoma State University, 

where he studied with Denny Zeitlin's long-time musical collaborator, George 

Marsh, and graduated last year with a B.A. in jazz studies. A versatile and 

sensitive drummer, equally adept at playing exciting solos or providing 

tasteful, unobtrusive accompaniment to the subtlest of jazz vocalists, Alan 

enjoys the highest respect of his fellow musicians and has worked with some 

of the area's finest, including bassist Mel Graves and guitarist Randy 

Vincent. In 1997 Alan played the Monterey Jazz festival as a member of 

guitarist Henry Robinett's band, and will return to that prestigious annual 

event this year, in the band of pianist Art Hirahara. Asked to name his 

major musical influences, Alan replies, "everybody," but names Jeff "Tain" 

Watts, Joey Baron, Jack DeJohnette, Bill Stewart, and Paul Motian as 

favorites. Alan's musical rapport with David is the product of compatible 

musical sensibilities and over a decade of playing a variety of gigs 

together. When David discovered, to his delight, that the week in which he'd 

booked the studio for this album coincided with Alan's wife Julie's spring 

vacation, there was no question who the drummer on the session would be.

Trumpeter Nathan Botts, born September 13, 1978, in Pleasant Hill, 

California, began gigging around his native San Francisco Bay Area at the age 

of fifteen, eventually finding employment at North Beach's premier jazz club, 

playing in the Jazz at Pearl's Monday Night Big Band. At seventeen, after 

receiving exposure as a member of the National Grammy in the Schools All-Star 

Jazz Ensemble in Los Angeles, he moved to New York to accept a generous 

scholarship from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Lew 

Soloff and Byron Stripling, and took advantage of his East Coast location to 

play in the New Haven Symphony Orchestra Pops. He left New York after a 

year, in 1998, to serve as an LDS missionary in Panama until 2000, when, upon 

his return to the U.S., he enrolled in BYU's jazz program. He has appeared 

as a guest soloist with the New Oakland Jazz Orchestra and TRPTS (both under 

the direction of Mike Vax), and has appeared with the Oakland East-Bay 

Symphony. As a jazz soloist, he's played alongside such artists as Jon 

Faddis and Randy Brecker. As a band leader, he's headed up the Jazz 

Collective and the Nathan Botts Quartet, recording his debut CD with the 

latter in 1997 for the Three-Point-One label. Nathan's awards include the 

Dave Brubeck Award for Jazz Composition (1996), the Jon Faddis Award for 

Musical Excellence (1998), the Lional Hampton Jazz Festival Award for 

Outstanding College Trumpet Soloist (2001), and second place in the 

International Trumpet Guild Competition (2001). Nathan is currently a 

finalist in the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Competition.

Doctor Ray Smith is an all-around wonderful human being - a role-model, 

mentor, and musician of astonishing versatility. An instrumentalist at home 

in both classical and jazz contexts, and adept at all five woodwind 

instruments (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone) as well as 

electronic wind instruments and various ethnic recorders, penny whistles, and 

flutes - he has over 130 CD credits and can be heard on numerous TV themes 

and jingles and film scores, including The Sandlot, Mi Familia, The Swan 

Princess, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Ricky Lake Show, 

commercials for Buick and Chevy, and themes for Canadian and German 

television. He also performs periodically with the Utah Symphony and the 

Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and is a regular with the Utah Saxophone Quartet and 

Q'd Up, a jazz quintet. An educator as well as instrumentalist, Ray 

currently teaches at BYU in the capacity of Director of Jazz Studies and 

Professor of Saxophone. BYU's top big band, Synthesis, which Ray leads, has 

received national and international recognition, winning numerous 

competitions and performing at the Montreaux (Switzerland), North Sea 

(Holland), Antibes (French Riviera), Riga (Latvia), Pori (Finland), Kongsberg 

(Norway), and Umbria (Italy) jazz festivals, and touring Japan, China, and 

Siberia. Ray is the recipient of the Woody Herman Award for Musical 

Excellence and Professionalism, and of the Voice of Jazz Award for the State 

of Utah. His newest CD, Q'd Up is currently receiving national airplay.

About the music on this CD . . . Cole Porter's "I Love Paris," the first of 

two trio tracks on the album, begins with a bass figure that Michael 

appropriated from the Philly rap group, The Roots, and alternates between 

that funky line and a straight-ahead swing. This arrangement, according to 

David, happened "pretty much spontaneously. Mike started playing that line 

without any particular song in mind, then Alan, who's adept at playing funk, 

jumped in, and I just started playing the first song that popped into my 

head, which was 'I Love Paris.'" When asked if the arrangement owed 

something to Jacky Terrasson's 1994 recording of the tune, which alternates 

similarly between a rock beat and a ballad feel, David said that it probably 

had - unconsciously - as he'd heard Jacky's version before recording the song 

himself, but that he hadn't been thinking of it at the time.

"Once I Loved" is one of David's favorite tunes by the great Brazilian 

composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim. Growing up, David often heard McCoy Tyner's 

energetic 1975 version (with Ron Carter and Elvin Jones), which frequently 

found its way onto our turntable. But the more lyrical approach taken here, 

inspired by Shirley Horn, has its own appeal, highlighted by Ray's impeccable 

flute solo, Kenji's sensitive comping, and the contrapuntal dialogue between 

Ray and David that closes the performance.

I was pleased to hear David play the verse to Johnny Green's "I Cover the 

Waterfront," (a practice too rarely included in jazz performances), 

particularly effective over the shimmering "wash" or "pad" of Kenji's guitar, 

which also complements the debut of the album's other guitarist, Joshua, 

whose gorgeously sparse solo demonstrates his mastery of space and 

illustrates the adage that "less" can be "more." The interplay between the 

two guitarists on this track alone is confirmation of the wisdom of David's 

decision to have them both on the session.

David also elects to play the verse on George Gershwin's "The Man I Love," 

the second of the album's two trio tracks, taken at a relaxed medium-swing 

(perhaps David's favorite tempo) and featuring a deft bass solo by Michael, 

over Alan's tasty brush work.

"Harrisville," on which Nathan makes his impressive debut on this album, 

allows both horns and both guitars ample uptempo solo space. (Note Kenji's 

lightning response to the phrase traditionally associated with "Brazil" that 

David quotes in his solo.) The composition is David's, inspired by tenor 

saxophonist Eddie Harris's "Freedom Jazz Dance" and by the memory of that 

great architect of soulful musical structures, pianist Gene Harris, who, 

after a 1995 concert (produced by WEJA Enterprises' Willie and Jackie 

Atkinson) in the Vacaville Performing Arts Theatre, honored our family with 

his presence in our home for a late dinner. I remember how, that evening, as 

Gene was enjoying the swordfish I'd grilled on the hibachi, David slipped the 

Blue Hour album (featuring Stanley Turrentine with Gene's trio The Three 

Sounds) onto the turntable. "Nineteen sixty," Gene announced delightedly, 

after hearing the first couple of bars, and he and David proceeded to have a 

pleasant conversation about the session.

Ted Grouya's beautiful melody "Flamingo," which provides this album's title 

track, was introduced in 1941 by Herb Jeffries, singing Edmund Anderson's 

colorfully evocative lyric - "Flamingo, like a flame in the sky . . . with 

your tropical hue . . . flying over the island . . . where the sun meets the 

sea" - with the Duke Ellington orchestra. I was born the following year, and 

have loved the song since as far back as I can remember. When David told me 

of his plans to make this album and asked if I had any requests, "Flamingo" 

was my immediate response. Besides the Jeffries/Ellington recording (which I 

probably heard on the radio from the time I was born - perhaps before) I have 

in my (mostly vinyl collection) a stunning piano version by Erroll Garner, 

his right hand floating inimitably over the beat, a plaintive rendition by 

Archie Shepp on alto, featuring an exquisite piano solo by the late, great 

Jaki Byard, a sparse, poignant vocal treatment by Carmen McRae, and, of 

course, the 1951 R&B hit by Earl Bostic. David had heard all these 

recordings and, though he hadn't played the song very often before making 

this album, I can hear a blending of their influence in his rendition, which 

takes the tune at a ballad tempo but maintains a solid-four feel (Alan's 

idea) with an occasional suggestion of New Orleans triplets, thus evoking 

some of the song's swing-era and R&B history. Unlike many jazz ballad 

performances, this one, featuring Kenji's laid-back guitar (he'd never played 

the tune before the performance you hear on this CD!), lends itself to taking 

your sweetie in your arms and slow-dancing. Try it. You'll like it.

"Dreamin'" augers very well indeed for its young composer, BYU pianist Joseph 

Fifield. The tune, with its smoothly alternating rhythms, and its treatment 

here are reminiscent of some of the music that George Adams and Kenny Wheeler 

recorded for ECM back in 1979. Both horns make solid statements and Joshua 

comps impishly behind Kenji's felicitous solo.

Jimmy Smith's "Root Down," which provided the title track for his 1972 album 

and has since been sampled and used as the foundation for the Beastie Boys 

version, hearkens back to David's nights in New Orleans, performing funk with 

Galactic. Everyone shines here, with Michael and Alan laying down a rock-soli

d, soul-drenched beat, David honking, growling and squealing, and the two 

guitarists engaged in some friendly give-and-take, with Joshua's solo flowing 

almost imperceptibly into Kenji's, as they trade comping roles and later swap 

phrases, Kenji's materializing in elegant flurries and Joshua's in wryly 

twanging ripostes.

I promised at the outset of these notes to be unabashedly laudatory in 

writing about my son's work on this album, and so my words here may be 

dismissed as the mere product of a loving father's bias, but that inescapable 

stereotype notwithstanding, I can honestly say that, to my ear, this album 

tops most debut albums by young jazz musicians in several respects: the 

quality of material selected for performance, the graceful flow of the segues 

from one tune to the next, the creativity in the arrangements, the 

spontaneous emotion informing the album's improvisations, the degree of 

confidence reflected in the musicians' willingness to relax and take whatever 

risks their muse demands of them (with no over-dubbing!), and the musical 

rapport evident between them, in which youthful egos and formidable chops 

have been subordinated to the collective goal of creating beautiful music. 

And to David: I couldn't approve more highly of what you've accomplished 

here. I'm proud of you, my man. Keep up the good work.

David R. Halliday

September 2001