Wandered Around, Eventide and Blossoms Waiting were all recorded during one afternoon session on September 28, 2021.

The jazz standards I've turned my attention to for these albums are all phenomenal gems of music and lyric invention, with Moment's Notice being a purely instrumental composition.

Wandered Around offers A Day In the Life of A Fool, It Had To Be You and Lover Man.

Eventide presents Stella By Starlight and Just One of Those Things.

Blossoms Waiting features Time After Time, Moment's Notice and Poor Butterfly.

One aspect of my Indian classical music orientation synergizing with my jazz immersion would be the distinctive time lengths of my improvisations, reflecting how ragas are commonly rendered with much longer durations than jazz standards. Additionally, my tendency to open with rather slow tempos connects with the opening tempo-less alap form of ragas.

My left hand may be compared to the Indian tamboura in the sense of being an essential accompaniment even though it presents evolving melodic counterpoint interacting with my right hand improvisations as opposed to maintaining a repeated pattern.

There was an Indian holy man who devoted his entire life to a single raga! Most Indian masters tend to have one or two dozen favorite ragas amidst hundreds of possibilities. There is certainly a parallel with jazz masters and their extemporization material.

To date, I have not repeated any of my jazz standard selections given the vast number of songs available, but I certainly can envision myself doing so because like ragas, jazz standards suggest infinite interpretive potential, really only limited by the imagination of the practitioner.

- Michael Robinson, April 2022, Los Angeles

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