Helen Sung Everybody's Waltz

One late Summer evening in 2018, our co-founders were wandering around aimlessly in New York City's West Greenwich Village neighborhood when they came upon an underground club called Mezzrow. Named after the prolific marijuana dealer and trombonist Mezz Mezzrow, the club was owned and operated by the folks who run Small's Jazz club down the block. In the 1990s, the location had been a bar which served drinks in test-tubes. But on this sultry night, the place featured a duet with one of our favorite musicians, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and Helen Sung, a Texan pianist of whom we hadn't heard before. We ambled down the stairs and over the next hour or so were entranced by Helen's fast and precise piano playing, which poured off the instrument like beautiful and complex webs of sound. Marquis Hill had blown us away a couple years earlier with his definitive album statement on the current Chicago jazz scene The Way We Play. We subbed in Marquis for Jeremy and presto: everybody's waltz. The material on the record was composed as a song-cycle to mirror the stages of a human life. It is the sole JMI release pressed at Gotta Groove pressing plant in Ohio which is developing a reputation as the audiophile label's choice. The cover pic, taken by our frequent photographer Roslyn Wertheimer, was framed by Mr. Mandel in a portent of things to come