Liner Notes:

Collective improvisation captures the essence of our musical dialogue heard on this album – it allowed us to rediscover familiar and less-familiar compositions, and exploit uncharted melodic, harmonic and rhythmic territories.
The title track, “Crossing Paths,” sets the mood for the entire album with a two-part imitative melody that grows into a collective improvisation. “Kary’s Trance” is a composition by Lee Konitz based on the harmonic progression of “Play Fiddle Play.” While reading about Arthur Altman’s “Play Fiddle Play” in the Great Song Thesaurus, we discovered that it borrows the chord changes from Herbert’s “Gypsy Love Song,” which in turn is based on Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E minor, Op. 11. Our interpretation of “Kary’s Trance” extends this chain of contrafacts and sends the music into unexpected modal regions. The third selection, Tadd Dameron’s “On a Misty Night,” features a more traditional treatment of the tune with subtle harmonic and rhythmic displacements. Our rendi