for tangerines and oranges and mangos…and some evenings having such juices added to vodka or gin … for homeless cats of all shapes and colours emerging out of bushes or out of nowhere following me and wanting to play when I go for walks (I wish I could find homes for all of them)… for lyricists like Johnny Mercer, whose words are as eventful as the music of the songs collaborated on … without such lyricists it's impossible to say how instrumental jazz would have developed … for Poncho Sanchez representing the highest form of the art of music performance with his band affording us breathtaking vistas of the magnificent culture he represents … for Richard Davis for making the acoustic bass soar like his ancestral kora (an instrument he never heard of before we spoke!) and for confirming my intuition that he was profoundly influenced by Ravi Shankar… I also loved Richard's story about dining with Charlie Parker at a favoured hot dog establishment after moving from Chicago to Manhattan … we have Pink's here at La Brea and Melrose, but nowadays I enjoy thinking about having a chili dog when passing by and that seems to be enough ...

- Michael Robinson, December 2015, Los Angeles

© 2015 Michael Robinson All rights reserved

Michael Robinson is a Los Angeles-based composer, programmer, pianist and musicologist. His 199 albums include 152 albums for meruvina and 47 albums of piano improvisations. Robinson has been a lecturer at UCLA, Bard College and California State University Long Beach and Dominguez Hills.