This recording is a story about a very casual friendship that coexisted with a passionate but intermittent musical love affair. On the surface, Dave Klingman and I were from two completely different generations, each coming from a different time and culture with different manners and protocols, and each having a largely different set of heroes forming the backbone of our personal musical heritage. But underneath those differences, there was a striking commonality – we each saw music as a form of intimate interactive conversation, and we were both looking for another person to converse with on a level that would go deeper than what the limitations of our professional playing lives generally had to offer. This album is a document of a few of those conversations. Although I knew him by reputation, I never formally met Dave until he came up to me at the end of a gig I was playing at the local jazz club with the Harry Pickens trio in 2005. He introduced himself, telling me that he loved the spontaneous vibe of the trio, and asked if I would be interested in getting together and playing a session or two just for fun. I had time in my schedule and liked the idea of the challenge of playing in a context with so much open space and no harmonic support, so I agreed. After all, what was there to lose but a few hours of an afternoon? And as always when playing with others, there is potentially everything to gain. Shortly after that we met for the first time at my house, where I have a music room designed just for such occasions. During the first session, we played for several hours just calling one tune after another, and the connection felt great; he seemed to understand everything I was playing even when I pushed boundaries and was able to react to it in kind. I regret that I did not record that first session, but I quickly discovered that Dave was every bit as self-critical about his playing as I am about mine; I also found that he was every bit as determined to learn and improve, so I asked him if he would mind me recording any future sessions. He agreed, on the condition that I would send him home with a CD copy of the results to study each time we played. The results of these sessions are what I would call “pure music”. That is to say, music played with no ulterior motive other than the basic enjoyment of playing. There are no words for how much of a breath of fresh air this kind of setting was for two old gig hounds. Normally, we had to confine our playing to the situation, including parameters like where the music was supposed to fit in with the event, the noise level of the room, the music chosen for the occasion, and the mood of the bandleader we were hired by. But in this setting, there were no directives, no imperatives other than “what do we feel like playing right now”? And beyond that, we were so happy to be doing it that there was never any judgement of what we should have done, or how either one of us should have approached the music once it started. We never used charts or made arrangements - one of us would call a tune and a key (or better, just start playing), and we would just figure out the rest on the fly. We quickly learned to forget that the tape was rolling, so we took a million chances and made a million mistakes; when these happened, we laughed and kept playing. We were there to experience music making, and understood that we could judge it later if we wished, or not. I am only now just beginning to understand how unwittingly wise we were to do this, and how rare and fleeting such experiences often are in life. We carried on this way from 2005 to 2015, sometimes meeting every other week, sometimes one or the other of us getting so busy with life that six months or more would go by. Eventually life interrupted the sessions for good when more fundamentally important life issues took us in different directions, but I’ve always had it as a goal to release an album of these sessions as a record of those wonderful times we spent playing music for all the right reasons, and as a tribute to the amazing player and humble, classy human being that Dave has always been. That’s the basic story of this album. It’s not polished or shiny. It’s not premeditated or slickly produced. The recording techniques and equipment vary wildly from session to session depending on what year it was and how much of a hurry I was in to set it up on any given day. The recordings are all single takes with no editing, punch ins, and no corrections of any kind. There was never any written music, or any spoken arrangements. And in this sense, I suspect that in some ways this project may represent some of the purest music I will ever have had the opportunity to participate in over the span of my entire life – past, present, and future. I hope I am wrong, but I suspect I may not be. For better or worse, we humbly submit the music to the listener in the hope that some of it may take them to a better place for a few moments.