Zee, Zoe, Kyle ... and Friends
Seven Stories
Millennium Music

Imagine seven paintings. First, one entitled The Awakening, featuring a pair of soft blue eyes surrounded by stairways and floating geometric shapes. Next you encounter colorful natural and man-made jigsaw patterns residing in The Direction. Later you come across disrupted kaleidoscopic symmetries in The Journey. Finally there is Imagination, a blank, white canvas in a simple wooden frame. Now imagine the music that would accompany them, for this is the concept behind this album: a musical interpretation of seven paintings with one song for each painting.

Zee, Zoe, and Kyle are, respectively, keyboardist and guitarist Bobby "Zee" Soler, guitarist and bassist Bob "Zoe" Soler, and saxophonist and flutist Robert Kyle. The seven paintings inspiring Seven Stories were all conceived by Zoe, each of them acrylic on canvas except for Queen Of Fantasy, which was created using a computer. The accompanying, interpretive music is composed and arranged by either Zee, Zoe, or Kyle, each playing the above mentioned instruments among others, and they are joined by "friends" on accompanying instruments, including John Lewis on drums and tambourine and Tony Shogren on pandeiro and djembe.

The seven paintings inspire contemporary jazz, flavored with nuances of synthetic New Age, soulful blues, and island breezes. For each song one envisions the painting that evoked it and is readily led there and beyond by the inspired music. This is the kind of album that makes you stop, listen, and look.

Copyright © 1997 J. A. Gilbert