While quietly setting numerous standards both musically and technically in the jazz recording field, Digital Music Products has prided itself on pushing numerous stylistic envelopes, from the tasty pop fusion of Flim & the BB's and the Fantasy Band to the artsy, straight-ahead skinning of Joe Morello. Expanding its palette even further, the Stamford, Connecticut based company enters the New Adult Contemporary realm for the first time with the sly and seductive half-vocal, half-instrumental Follow Me by the new ensemble Thursday Diva. Mesmerizingly rhythmic, melodic, and tailor-made for late-night sensuality, Thursday Diva features the merging talents of producer, composer, percussionist, and keyboardist David Charles and composer, lyricist, and song stylist Lisa Lombardo, along with slick, all-star contributions from Michael Brecker, Nelson Rangell, and labelmate Chuck Loeb.
The title of this CD reissue probably refers to the fact that this was singer Betty Carter's first released recording in five years; a second CD (Round Midnight) also originated from the same concert. The mature Betty Carter is heard for the first time on this record which finds her taking wild chances on a set mostly dominated by standards.
Remembering, written in memory of Evan Scofield, is Mark-Anthony Turnage’s response to the young man’s premature death from cancer in 2013, at the age of 26. Turnage knew Evan as the son of family friends, the jazz guitarist John Scofield and his wife Susan, and the sister of Jeannie, the partner of Ursula. A boy whose quirky but deep rooted enthusiasms – for cinema, axes, hyacinths, friends – reflected a readiness to take on life in all its fullness, a young man whose ways of seeing seemed so good, so full of promise and possibility. Such early deaths strike us less like personal tragedies and more like cosmic catastrophes. What kind of a world is it that allows such things to happen?