is an interesting figure who gave up a promising piano career to compose. In addition to classical music, he had also played blues, pop, jazz, and rock, and after a time, he began to incorporate those into his concert works. Here, returns as a pianist with a baker's dozen of his own short works that display his style in focused ways. Pieces may begin with simple pop or jazz melodies or patterns, but then they do not develop as expected. The results are quite intriguing. 's ultimate ancestor here is , but the flavor of his music is different; he is not putting pop materials into classical molds so much as applying new structural devices, some of them quite modern, to those materials. Sample the , where the initially simple tonality is pushed to the edge, drawing the music into a subtle emotional realm. In many cases, the modern devices serve to emphasize the programmatic content of the work, as in , where a four-note jazz figure is repeated and just slightly altered in a vaguely minimalist fashion. There is an improvisatory feel to 's music, although apparently, it is fully written out; he explores the affinities between jazz and Baroque music in fresh ways in the and in . Really this is unlike anything else classical composers have done with pop music, and it suggests many avenues for further experimentation. ~ James Manheim