!!! Congratulations to you and brother Patrick !!! Scott's Red Star is superb, a sonic delicatessen of accomplished musicianship and accommodating mood, more flavors than Baskin-Robbins, more substance than a baked potato with fixins ...

... I like the way Scott's leads with one of its best: come right on in, no waiting ... Aimitie opens with an inquiring guitar intro, and the piano answers "Yeah, I'm here, I'll be going with ..." Then later in the trek, roles are reversed and the piano breaks trail until the long-walk ending, where piano and guitar disappear over a distant hill side-by-side ...

... Then on to Paradiso, bittersweet, beautiful and sad, and then the sadness melts away ...

... to CHANGE ! Mongo Santamaria's Afro Blue, elegantly positioned somewhere between traditional jazz and a modern jazz motif. The flute and flute-fade are particularly tasty.

... Then just when you think you're going to pause for a moment in the shade of "Trees" to catch your breath, your breath is instead taken away by a piano that RINGS FOREVER ...

... The Trees They Do Grow High offers a chance for the album's (... I still doggedly call them "albums" ...) instrumentalists to introduce themselves one at a time ... From recorder ?? ... or wooden flute ?? ... to Jonathan's violin, then guitar, and a piano with echoes of Scarborough Fair intertwined ... OOH, the violin note held at the end ...

... A frisky romp down Madaket Road, just a touch of modern jazz wherein the drums, cymbals, and bass in particular keep the pace brisk without being frenetic.

... Then, really one of my favorites ... A Lotus on Irish Streams marks a return to the piano in bittersweet, punctuated with a geographically surprising (... given the locales suggested by the title ...) SPANISH guitar sound ...But what I really like here is the evolution of the piano from the winsome to the playful, the sound a piano makes while chasing its tail ...

... 55 South is probably someone's urban address, but I heard it all wrong ... It put me behind the wheel of a '55 Chevy tooling along on an open highway, passing through mottled sun and tree-shadow in the summer after graduation. A touch of R&B saxophone keeps my right foot heavy, and at one point I'm pulled around a tight corner by the toms ...

... Chivalry caught my attention with all its internal thematic changes, but what I keep going back to is the inspired use of cymbals throughout and the oh-so-careful timing of piano and guitar near its end ...

... Chase Theme: A "civilized" flight for guitar, rather than a headlong rush into fear or panic, featuring a superb bass undercurrent ...

?? Tinder Box ?? The title eludes me ... I hear a child's music box in the piano opening ... The piano pulls the child into adolescence, adding guitar and other complexities to the mystery of growing up ...

... Dark ... Only the sax is smoky, "dark" it isn't; rather, joyous. And even the sax is smoky only at first, then it gets lifted to joy by the piano near the end ...

... Washboard ... WOW ... If it were possible to make a silent movie about ragtime, this would be the score for the movie-house piano. The appropriate use of guitar at sensible and sensitive intervals is appreciated ...

... Summertime ... Eagerly awaited by all of us who still revel in the old East River recording from Cavern Records... Exceptional guitar fingerwork... Jonathan Levi's violin added-in at a whisper grows to voice the season ...

... From Bear Mountain Lookout, you can taste Charlie Daniels' eastern Tennessee mountains in the guitar and the Colorado Rockies in the more western piano. The guitar surprises (... AGAIN ? It's ALWAYS doing that ... Must be a theme here ...) with a return to jazz, then finds its way back to a Fire on the Mountain feel ...

... The Senator's Rag -- MUST be a Caribbean junket. Eau de calypso, just a smidgen of Spanish flavor in the flute to hint at Hispaniola Underground ...

!!! WHEW !!! More ravings than you ever asked for, but that's what happens at 5:30 in the morning ... I really enjoyed listening over the weekend, "Scott's" will top the Bob's house playlist for awhile, I think ...

One other thing I want to add, because I've engineered at recording and mixdown some, and I appreciate the effort and the result: The album (... there's that word again ...) is SUPERBLY engineered throughout. From the piano that RINGS FOREVER in "Trees" to the violin note held in "... They Do Grow High" -- Just listen if you want to know how these instruments SHOULD sound ...

... Again, congratulations, quite an achievement. Please keep me posted on coming projects, hope to find my way to a concert venue sometime ...