“There’s
no place like home."Everybody comes home sometime. The homes we discover are not always in the places or with the people we expect. But there are times in our lives when we know with certainty that we belong exactly where we are.
Coming Home is our attempt to reflect in musical terms the many shades and moods that we experience as we find the places where we “fit.” Most of the songs evolve during a musical road trip Peter Dent and I played in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island in May and June of 2004. To those who welcomed us into their homes, pubs, and churches and to those who shared their musical talents with us, we thank you and dedicate this disc to you.
From “Goin’ Home To Lonesome Town” to “Go to Dark Gethsemane”, the CD has a spiritual theme running throughout. There is a musical story of a sacred presence on the paths all of us travel. Peter Dent and I have drawn on the traditions and sources that have defined us individually and as a duet: jazz standards, pop songs, original compositions, and the ever-powerful melodic world of hymns and spirituals.
In this our second CD, the duet setting allows us to have direct musical conversations (piano and saxophone) with each other as the various songs unfold. We owe a conceptual debt to the great Archie Shepp/Horace Parlan duet recordings, “Trouble in Mind” and “Goin’ Home” as benchmarks for the conversational jazz we strove to create on Coming Home.