Feeling Blue

Here in this one album you can listen to the musical development of a sax player extraordinaire: the silky, seductive sounds of a genius. From every track on this compilation CD comes the gentleness, warmth and musicianship of a human who considered himself the world's slowest sax player. None of the raucous intensity of screaming horns here - instead savour the purity of sax, guitar and rhythm section and marvel at the depths of feeling that Paul Desmond expressed with such seeming ease. His untimely death in 1977 left an enormous hole in jazz music. Listening to this album makes us realise why it is that the hole has been impossible to fill.