I have been a fan of Peter Erskine's for decades and I don't know for sure the first time I heard him, but I know the Steps Ahead album "Modern Times" made a huge impact on me. It remains in my all time top ten favorites to this day. Stop reading and go buy it now if you don't already own it!

In one of my first conversations with Peter, he asked me who I was going to get to play bass on the session. My first reaction was to ask him who he'd prefer. "Dave Carpenter" was the first and only name out of his mouth. Works for me. Then in my first conversation with Dave, he asked me who would be playing sax. I asked him who he would recommend. "Bob Sheppard" was his first and only response. Fantastic. I had known of Bob from John Beasley's "Cauldron" and Billy Childs' "Twilight is Upon Us." (Both out of print and both awesome!)

One of the things Peter told me was to get a good studio and engineer. So I went over my collection of CDs in my mind and remembered Kei Akagi's "Playroom." I think it is the best recorded and mastered acoustic jazz album I own (the music on it is great too). Looking at the credits I found it was recorded at Chick Corea's Mad Hatter studio. My decision was made.

The musicians are ready, the moment is here. What do we play first? I'm thinking I love to play fast tunes like Charlie Parker's "Donna Lee," but I know my fingers are cold plus these guys don't really know me. For some reason it came to me that I should get into a Miles mood and not try to impress anybody with my fleet fingers. Try to impress them with my musicality. I brought up a piece of mine that didn't have a name - didn't even have a melody. It was just a bass progression I had put together while tinkering with the Moog synthesizer years earlier. I said to Dave, "This isn't a bassline really, just a sketch. Could you flesh it out a bit?" To Buzz and Bob I said, "I didn't write a melody - do you think you two could improvise one together?" And to Peter I was even less help. I had no idea what the drums should be doing on this. The only thing I knew was it wasn't a typical groove. Oh, and it's in 3/4.

No discussion. We play. One take. It's perfect. The whole song is perfect, but there is one moment of extreme perfection - ask me about it next time you see me. Anyway that's where the name "Simpatico" came from. Just now I looked up "simpatico" in the dictionary, and it reads, "being on the same wavelength." That's about right.