Joel Forrester is an undiscovered national treasure. He is brilliant both as a pianist and as a composer. His music is intelligent, witty, and colorful as it looks into the jazz tradition and emerges as something individual and different. Millions have heard his great theme for the NPR show Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Knowledgeable jazz fans hope that the Koch albums will continue to reveal this artist's exceptional talents to many new listeners.

Start with a blast from the past: Joel Forrester and the Illustrious Others is a 1980 recording that finds the artist as a younger man with many of the players with whom he has come to be associated: Phillip Johnston, Denis Charles, Dave Hofstra and more. The music is identifiably Joel's - ever-fresh and smartly swinging.

Of special note is a rare appearance on record of the late tenor saxophonist Lucky Ennett, who, Joel says, was exemplary in his "wedding of strength and remorse." Ennett, who had played with Duke Jordan, Charles Brown, and Duke Ellington, was a solid presence in the world of Forrester and the later Microscopic Septet, and he makes that presence felt in his brief appearances here.

Move forward nearly twenty years for your next Joel Forrester experience. Believe It is the second disc from the recording that Forrester's group People Like Us made in 1997. (The first, In Heaven, came out in '98 and is well worth tracking down.) Unfortunately, it was also the last PLU recording made by drummer Denis Charles, who died on March 26, 1998. Joel notes that the "musician has never lived who could translate so fluidly his current emotional state or portray it so vividly . . . the moment was his moment."

People Like Us is also a beautifully creative outlet for baritone saxophonist Claire Daly, whom Joel once called "the major interpreter of my music." She gives new breadth to the scope of Forrester's ideas, and she's a most expressive soloist.

So kick back with these two and enter the wild wonderful world of Joel Forrester.