It’s been seven years since Tea Leaf Green has put out a record. We spent almost 20 years on the road and then stopped. Amidst growing families, jobs and personnel changes we started doing other things and took on responsibilities that kept us closer to home.

In this fourth volume in their Richard Rodney Bennett series, John Wilson and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra turn to his Piano Concerto, commissioned by the John Feeney Trust for the CBSO and written in 1968. A chance meeting with Stephen Kovacevich provided Bennett with a willing soloist, and the work was premiered in Birmingham in September that year. The fellow composer Anthony Payne’s judgement was unequivocal: ‘It’s a bloody good work.’ The soloist here, Michael McHale, gives a virtuosic performance which certainly lives up to that judgement.

Outstanding tenor and recent Juilliard School graduate Kyle Bielfield has lost no time in making quite a name for himself in the realms of opera and art song alike. In this, his debut recording, he offers a carefully chosen assortment of outstanding American art songs by the finest domestic composers – to include Amy Beach, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Samuel Barber, John Duke, Ned Rorem, Mark Abel and others. He further blesses us with classic examples of nostalgia-ridden vocal Americana by Stephen Foster, Aaron Copland, Irving Berlin and Leonard Bernstein. All texts are also by American writers and poets. The title theme derives from the album’s three winning settings of former American Poet Laureate Robert Frost’s signature poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States. It originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in blues and ragtime. Jazz is seen by many as "America's classical music". Since the 1920s Jazz Age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression. It then emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African-American and European-American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms".