David Garfield - Jazz Outside The Box

Keyboardist David Garfield was nineteen when he got his start playing alongside influential bebop jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Many opportunities came quickly for him in contemporary jazz as well as in R&B and pop, but straight-ahead jazz has remained in his core.This 15-track jazz set that revisits Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, Joe Sample, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Oliver Nelson and Joe Zawinul classics, applies an imaginative jazz varnish to a pair of Sting songs, and presents four of his own compositions. To materialize his vision, Garfield rounded up a massive ensemble that boasts a number of accomplished collaborators including Wallace Roney, Poncho Sanchez, Steve Jordan. Randy Brecker, Michael McDonald, Tom Scott, Eric Marienthal, Pete Christlieb, Bennie Maupin, Brian Auger, Will Lee, Airto Moreira, and dozens of other prominent players guest on the record, which includes a string quartet and an orchestra conducted by John Clayton. Jazz Outside the Box contains among the final performances by a pair of recently-departed guitar greats, Chuck Loeb and Larry Coryell. Perhaps the most unusual contribution comes from The Doors' John Densmore, who plays drums and orates on a spoken word segment on the full-length version of Silver's Song For My Father.