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Barolo Blue by Mike Pope

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Album Title: The Parts You Keep
Label: Origin Records
Released: 2025

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About the Album

Bassist, composer, and recording engineer Mike Pope taps into the music and musicians who represent several pivotal life phases over his striking 30-year career, as well as from broad positions in the great timeline of jazz. From trumpeter Randy Brecker, a foundational figure in modern jazz, to saxophonist Roxy Coss, a brilliant leader representing the next guard, to the young guitarist Amaury Cabral who Pope heard at Berklee, they join Pope contemporaries, pianist Geoffrey Keezer and drummer Nate Smith, for a vivid set of originals, along with modern arrangements of music from Bird and Coltrane. Of note, Pope traveled to Atlanta to record his 85-year-old mother, an accomplished classical pianist, as a centerpiece of the closing track “The Parts You Keep.” Imagined as a reminiscence of his youth when he’d wake up to his mother practicing, Pope inserts her performance into the piece, wrapping up the album with her solo rendition of the Ernst von Dohnányi piece it was derived from.

Tracks

Misgivings; Steeplechase; Giant Steps; Dashan’s Flying Ubercar; That Old Feeling; Barolo Blue; Past is Prologue; The Parts You Keep; Winterreigen, Op. 13: V. Sphärenmusik.

Personnel

Additional Personnel

Amaury Cabral: guitar; Ann Almond Pope: piano; Yu-Ting Wu: violin; Jennifer Houck: violin; Ivan Mendoza: viola.

Reviews

• The Parts You Keep by Jack Bowers

Date featured

September 12, 2025

This song appears by permission of the contributing artist and/or record company. It is for personal use only; no other rights are granted or implied.

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