Bassist Brian McCree has been a pillar of the Boston music scene for decades, performing with Bobby Hebb, Alan Dawson, Jackie Byard, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, Ricky Ford, Joe Bonner, John Hicks, Ronnie Burrage, Peter Laroca Sims, Jimmy Owens, Dave Liebman, Clifton Anderson, Nancy Dussault, Makanda Ken McKintyre, Alvin Batiste and Warren Smith.

In 2003, he moved to the Big Island of Hawaii, but he has been returning to his old home for gigs and recordingsessions.  Changes in the Wind is his first album as a leader, and features McCree’s favorite partners playing a set of

originals and a couple of standards.

The music is swinging, deep and soulful.  McCree has paid his dues on a thousand bandstands and his playing features no frills or affectations.  With a commanding tone and time feel, he anchors and propels the band, and when his turn to solo arrives, plays all the good notes.

The original compositions, written by four of the participants, may remind you of the moment in jazz when the elegiac melodicism and unlimited horizons of Coltrane

re-entered the mainstream, reinvigorating the way that

musicians approached song forms and chord progressions.

Changes in the Wind features a legendary Boston-based talent, vocalist Ron Murphy.  Blessed with a bass voice somewhere between Billy Eckstine and Barry White, Murphy sings the blues, gospel and jazz with fire and power, and is here featured on the very familiar Nature Boy along with his original, Cookie.  Murphy truly deserves to be heard and recognized beyond the Boston area. 

Salim Washington contributes tenor saxophone, flute and oboe.  His distinctive, warm tenor sax sound is complemented by his use of oboe in place of the more conventional soprano sax, adding a haunting, Eastern sound to two tracks.  Washington is a bandleader in his own right, including Love in Exile (Accurate 5028), and has sidemanned with Pharoah Sanders, Kenny Garrett, Reggie Workman, Rashied Ali, David Murray, Charles Tolliver and many others.   Washington has also recently published Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever, with co-author Farah Jasmine Griffin.

Bass trombonist Bill Lowe has performed with legends like Dizzy Gillespie, Eartha Kitt, Clark Terry, Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Cecil Taylor,

George Russell and Bill Barron.  He has co-led the Boston Jazz Repertory Orchestra,

the Bill Lowe/Phillipe Cretien Quintet and JUBA, co-produced Boston’s annual John

Coltrane Memorial Concert, and composed several major works, including the opera Reb’s Last Funeral, an ongoing interdiscinplinary project Signifyin’ Natives, and the music/theater piece Crossing John at the Crossroads.  Lowe has taught at several major universities, lectured throughout the world from Cuba to Paris, and mentored countless young musicians.

Pianist Joel Larue Smith has performed with the New York Philharmonic, the Toledo Symphony, the French National Orchestra, Mario Bauza, Kenny Burrell, Junior Cook and Wayne Andre.  Smith has been the Director of Big Band & Jazz Studies at

Tufts University since 1996. 

Drummer Peter Moutis has appeared with Jerry Bergonzi, Ira Sullivan, Bill

Dobbins, Bob Cooper, Cab Calloway, and many others.