375 – Stretches Out

This is the fourth Chiaroscuro recording by this astoundingly masterful pianist, and is considered by many to be the very best Mike Jones release ever. In an industry where accolades are thrown around far too generously, let’s put Mike Jones in perspective once and for all. He is consistently placed among those who are recognized as the indisputably greatest jazz piano players of all time. In Neil Tesser’s liner notes for the Verve Master’s Series reissue of Oscar Peterson’s “On The Town”, he states, “to find someone who can actually do what Oscar does, someone who has honed his own technique to the point where he can mimic the terrifying complexity of Oscar’s playing in the early 21st century, that pretty much comes down to one guy – a thirty-something, Berklee-trained, Las Vegas-based pianist with the decidedly non-monomial handle of Mike Jones. Not only did Jones get his initial inspiration from the Oscar Peterson records in his dad’s collection; at the age of 13, he decided to attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music on Oscar’s advice, when he met the famous pianist after a concert and asked where he could learn to play well. In Boston, Jones fell under the spell of Dave McKenna, analyzing and adapting McKenna’s much-lionized walking left-hand bass; but he also continued to study and refine his knowledge of Oscar’s style, arriving at an intriguing synthesis of the two. In the several albums of solo piano under his own name, Mike Jones has quietly established himself as the logical successor to the stultifying virtuosity of Oscar Peterson; better than anyone else, he knows the peaks and the pitfalls of such playing.”