Howard Riley : piano. CD 1 was recorded on 23rd July 1998. CD 2 was recorded on 11th April, 1999. CD 3 was recorded on 29th June 2004. CD 4 was recorded on 2nd August 2006. CD 5 was recorded on 27th June 2008. CD 6 was recorded on 22nd April 2010. All compositions by Howard Riley (PRS MCPS). Mastered by Ar nas Zujus at MAMAstudios. Design by Oskaras Anosovas. Producer Ð Danas Mikailionis. Co-producer : Valerij Anosov.' label info. 'The beauty of a short story, of course, is that it can be taken in at a sitting, indeed is so structured and formulated that it represents a single, continuous verbal performance, unlike the episodic or architectural structure of a long novel. It is, to that extent, a form that lends itself rather well to musical analogies, though not at first glance to improvised music, which tends to subordinate artful structure to moment-by-moment invention. And yet the greatest short stories can often seem improvised: brief, epiphanic flashes where the next step and the eventual outcome remain in doubt to the very end. There's something of the humane embrace of Chekhov, Hemingway's muscle, reticence and resistance to mere abstraction, but perhaps it's Henry James, that master of indefinable atmospheres and of the tense dialogue between Old World and New World cultures. This is the realm Howard Riley occupies with magisterial confidence, jazz given not just a catch-all cisAtlantic accent but with Howard's distinctive burr, classical language not simply swung but put through a harmonic and rhythmic gate that transforms it utterly. How to hear him? Italo Calvino, another master of the short form, put it perfectly: ÔIt is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.' Brian Morton