The music on this album are a series of portraits and stories from the last few years. The language is firmly rooted in the harmonic and rhythmic world of jazz, European formalism, and the textures and colors of Ambient music. The music itself is about friends, relatives, and their stories, as well as my own. The title track, "Necessity", was the impetus of the album. In the summer of 2013, we were hired to play a festival in Belfast, Maine, and four days before, I got a phone call from our tenor player, Gideon. Gideon had injured his hand in what we all now refer to as "a bizarre dish washing accident" and would be unable to play the festival. Rather than find another tenor player to sit in, I opted to perform as a quartet, and promptly set to re-working the music to a suitable quartet arrangement. I realized that trying to rework all are material in four days was highly unrealistic( many of out arrangements are complex enough that they just don't work as a quartet), and opted to generate some new material, and "Necessity" came out of that. The tune later took on the album title. "Flight of the Moon" was written for my Uncle Bob, and based on Claude Debussy's "Clair De Lune" from "Suite Bergamasque". My Uncle would often play this piece at family gatherings when I was growing up, and was a big support to me as a young musician. I think he came to every marching band competition and jazz band concert I was in, and I really wanted to give something back. The work applies similar modal shifts that Debussy uses in his piece, and mimics the rhythmic changes as well. There are three distinct rhythmic worlds: a two feel, 12/8, and a simple three. During the formal melodic statement, these are fixed in a specific order, but throughout the improvised sections the band freely mixes and adapts depending on how the soloist responds. This is very evident in trumpeter Mike Whitehead's solo. "A Fisherman's Dance" was written for my friend Noah, who was the bass player on our first album. "Everything Is Blue". It's initial harmonic anchor is similar to "Flight of the Moon", but reversed. I tried to create a sprightly bounce and a sense of wonder to this tune, to match Noah's personality, He is one of the smartest and most curious people I know, and also quite fearless, The title is a play on his surname, Fishman. "Echoes" is one of the most recent tunes in our book, and the third on the album to use the modal shifts of "A Fisherman's Dance" and "Flight if the Moon". The three tunes are a kind of cycle, and positioned on the album to create a specific architecture. The title refers to the specific ostinato carried by the rhythm and saxophone parts throughout the tune. "Wisteria" and "Portrait of Nixie" both were inspired by photographs. "Portrait of Nixie" came from a photo series taken by my friend Nick, entitled "Sunrise in the Saddle". These were a series of photos he took first thing in the morning as he was riding his bike up the coast to his job. The tune is a musical imagining of him on his bike in the early morning. "Wisteria" is probably the most traditional setting, and an homage to Thelonious Monk, loosely referencing "Ugly Beauty". "Approaching Autumn" is both literal and metaphorical. Autumn has always been my favorite time of year, and has always felt like a time of renewal, even more than Spring. Conversely, it is also a tune about getting older and is ironically one of the faster tempo pieces on the album. "Bingo" is a feature for our bass player, Duane Edwards. This tune came out of my year long writing blog, "The September Project". From September 2011 until September 2012, I wrote and recorded a piece of music every day, and posted them online. "Bingo" came around late in the project, and was a reference to the expression used by airplane pilots when they are low on fuel( "bingo fuel"). "Breathe" was also from that period, and also inspired by my Yoga studies at that time. It is something of a bridge piece for me, as I began to break away from the earlier more complex harmonic writing into a simpler more haiku like approach. More than any other, "Breathe" is a pure canvas for this group. Regardless of the different constructions and architecture of the music on this record, improvisation plays a key role. As distinct as each piece is, the musicians on the album sculpt shapes of their own and sign each piece with their own ideas and stories. It makes the album a clear snapshot of who we are at this moment and where we may be headed.