Mike Monford

Six of New York City's heaviest hitters convene at the legendary Rudy Van Gelder studios and presents music built to tickle your mind, hit you in the heart & get your feet tappin with nine tracks written by pianist Mike LeDonne and tenor sax player Eric Alexander.

This album is simply exceptional. You get a hearty dose of a musical genius's compositional skills and vocabulary, but you don't come away feeling as though you were "taken to school"; the music is very accessible…

Mike Oldfield is a bit of an enigma. On the one hand is the artist who almost single-handedly ushered in the genre of new age music with his epic masterpiece Tubular Bells, and then followed that with several albums, Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn, and even Tubular Bells II and III, all with tracks that invariable meandered for half an hour or more through various musical ideas and soundscapes – and no doubt would have gone on a lot longer had it not been for the constraints of vinyl and the restrictions on the length of musical compositions that would physically fit on two sides of a piece of plastic with micro grooves…

Most long-time hard rock followers are well aware of MIKE TRAMP in terms of his legacy as the front man for 80’s platinum recording artist WHITE LION. Considering the fact that a ‘true’ reunion is out of the question, given guitarist Vito Bratta’s retirement from the scene, that doesn’t mean that Mike needs to lay his creative nature down and live in nostalgia. “Nomad” is the latest solo venture, a 10-song adventure that explores more of a softer, Melodic Rock terrain than his heavier, youthful years…