Almost Modern: The Swing To Bop Project

New York's Kelly's Stables on 52nd Street was a hotbed of innovative musical ideas in the early 1940s. The Coleman Hawkins Band was extending the harmonic boundaries of the music in association with younger musicians laying the seeds of the bebop revolution. Dan Block (a NY tenor saxophonist and clarinetist) and guitarist Chris Flory spent 5 years researching the period in an attempt to find the connection points and transition from Swing to Bop. This recording, Almost Modern, is the musical result of their work, including tunes by Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas, Illinois Jacquet, Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Fuller, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk and Sir Charles Thompson.