Although he's best known to rock fans as a synth/keyboard wizard (due to his work with
Utopia and
David Bowie, among others),
Roger Powell is also one fine piano player, as evidenced throughout his 2009 solo release,
Blue Note Ridge. Fans hoping for an album's worth of Moog synthesizer-driven explorations will be disappointed, but this will certainly please admirers of soothing and sweet classic piano improvisations (a kin to light "dinner music" at an upper scale restaurant, if you will). Working once more with producer
Gary Tanin (
Tanin also produced
Powell's previous release, 2006's
Fossil Poets), a good representation of the album would be such standouts as the album opening "Path to the River," as well as "Take to the Sky," the latter of which was adapted from the
George Gershwin classic "Summertime" (for the unenlightened, it was originally from the 1935 opera, Porgy and Bess). Once and for all,
Blue Note Ridge proves that there is not a musical style that
Roger Powell isn't comfortable tickling the ivories to. ~ Greg Prato