I Wished For You

Horizontal is the latest in a decade long collaboration between Jim Kweskin and Samoa Wilson. The range of offerings, from tender ballads and raunchy blues to swinging jazz standards, reflects the restless and discerning nature of their musical explorations. Kweskin has been celebrated in his storied career for his love of a good tune as well as for bending and exploding accepted genres. He mentored Wilson throughout her early years. Together they played and sang the songs of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, Bessie Smith, Mildred Bailey, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred Astaire, Grandpa Jones, and dozens more including many drawn from The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk music and other sources of traditional folk music, blues and early jazz.

Record dates made by American jazz musicians for the Japanese jazz market are often a bit different in their approach. These 2006 sessions, recorded by Ken Peplowski over two days with pianist Ted Rosenthal, bassist Gary Mazzaroppi, and drummer Jeff Brillinger, are unusual in that ten standards (all ballads) are featured, though with the leader playing one version on tenor sax, then immediately following it with another on clarinet. The players are capable enough in varying the approach to each tune with the different instrumentation, with Peplowski's smoky tenor and lyrical clarinet satisfying the listener each time. But one would bet that most listeners would rather have this two-CD set programmed with one disc devoted to each instrument, rather than hearing each song twice in a row…

The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. More than a half-century after her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were singing.