Gary Husband, photo: Leonardo Pavkovic

I was keen to do a project turning my musical hand to some timeless old material and conveying some of it in my kind of way. Since I took some heavy personal loss in recent years, I really felt in a place where I needed to make an album of this kind. It’s one I experienced tremendous cathartic value making. In a big way, it’s my “blue” album.

– Gary Husband

The piano playing side of Englishman Gary Husband in focus. Known for his work with fellow northerner jazz icon John McLaughlin and the Panama born US drum great Billy Cobham, Husband is just as formidable a pianist as he is a very happening jazz-rock fusion drummer. On this gentle and loving album of instrumentals illuminated most of all by a Husband arrangement and performance of Bill Evans' 'My Bells' that the Mahavishnu himself McLaughlin had also interpreted on his early-1990s Time Remembered explorations in Evansiana. Husband's opening foray into the piece makes us think more directly than in McLaughlin's version (although the feeling is still there) in the mind's ear of the famous theme of Prokofiev's 'Troika' for the 1930s film Lieutenant Kijé.

The Wall Street Journal journalist Marc Myers writing on Jazzwax notes that Evans' 'My Bells' was ''based on his chord responses played on 'So What' for Miles Davis' Kind of Blue,'' and that ''the song was a beautiful expression that became lush and pensive once it was arranged by Claus Ogerman for Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra in 1965.''

All the Songs of Love and Solace pieces are kept brief and radio friendly length-wise. Only Johnny Mandel and Paul Williams' 'Close Enough For Love' and the opener 'If I Should Lose You,' clock in at longer than 5 minutes each. McLaughlin himself has heard the treatment of the latter, the Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger ballad, and has commented addressing ''Brother Gary'' directly: ''You are taking contemporary romanticism into another realm of harmonic extension without losing the essential romanticism that can never be replaced by abstractionism.'' How true.