Full circle. I started recording multi-track jazz interpretations and improvisations on Bach’s music back in the mid-1990s. I’ve already released my versions of the Goldberg Variations and both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier (“A Different Temperament” and “In Bach’s Embrace”) as well as a mixed bag entitled “JS: Jazz Conversations with Bach”. I also recorded the Art of Fugue, though I have not yet released that one. But this whole way of life actually began with the Sonatas for violin and keyboard, which I found both inspiring and instructive, and also liberating. If anybody can break a jazz musician out of the prison of vertical chord-scale theory, it’s old JS. At the time, however, I was recording on an analog cassette unit, and the sound was impossibly bad. So at last in 2016 I made up my mind to go back and do it again, this time for real. And thus the title, Full Circle, with a feeling of completion, and perhaps an end to all this multi-tracking. 

In the spring of 2017, I got a warning from the building where I've had my studio for years that one neighbor couldn't take the sound of an acoustic guitar in the afternoon anymore, and that I could no longer use the room for music. The music on this album represents some of the noise she found so intolerable. Time will tell, but my first interpretation of events is that perhaps after two decades, it's time to stop sitting alone weaving these tapestries, and come out and start performing full-time. Whatever fate and I wind up doing about this, I am so pleased with the way this one came out, and I hope it will give pleasure and perhaps some inspiration to those who happen upon it. —Andy Fite, Stockholm, Sweden August 21, 2017