It’s a simple matter of vowels, Jim once said: I get to do something instead of got to. His optimistic nature is activated by the exercise of a philosophical choice, and the smile on his face aptly conceals the substantial work that goes into producing it. You could say something similar about the music on this album: it’s hard to make it sound this easy. And every note is a chance to make a choice. It isn’t surprising, then, that someone as cheerful as Jim has considered the eventual circumstances of his own death. That isn’t meant to be a morbid thought. It’s another matter of choice, or at least of awareness that although nearly all our breaths are involuntary, they’re finite. Why not ponder in mind and soul that one day we will take our last one? And why not, in the meantime, borrow a few? Jim will tell you that most of his playing honors the masters who inspired him to take up the saxophone more than fifty years ago. Some of his breaths were originally theirs. No matter where they’re drawn from, our best and deepest breaths are voluntary: when we get to breathe, instead of got to. A man who plays a horn must in some way understand this. A man who plays two at once, as Jim can, must also understand that we have more breath, more life in us than we know. Jim puts an awful lot of himself into virtually everything he does, but never more than when he fills his mouth with a pair of saxophones and his two lung lobes with air, and makes twice the music anyone ought to be able to make. See his face then, consumed at once with full effort and full joy, and you see man getting to live two lifetimes, at one with himself. Adam Sobsey, March 2018