Search - Joel Forrester, People Like Us :: Believe It

Pianist and composer Joel Forrester's music is better known than you might think. Forrester's coup de grace is the theme for Terry Gross's Fresh Air, the National Public Radio show that roves through arts and culture on a daily basis. And while you can get Forrester's solo piano take on the theme on his Stop the Music, with Believe It you get Forrester's creative People Like Us quartet. Claire Daly's baritone sax is one of the band's hallmarks, with her slippery phrasing and clear fondness for the horn's low-end blurs. Forrester's People Like Us tunes are mostly midtempo, swinging crossroads where bebop and its predecessors make fruitful bedfellows on a rhythmic mattress of Denis Charles's drums and Dave Hofstra's bass. This is playful music, entertaining and improvisationally interesting, with Forrester integrating a bounce learned from hard bop and a style of composition that sounds touched with Herbie Nichols's delightful genius for segues and odd interludes. As a companion to Believe It, more daring listeners might want to try Forrester's early works, predating his tenure in Phillip Johnston's Microscopic Septet, on the aptly titled Pre-Microscopic Music Circa 1980. --Andrew Bartlett