The works on this recording, collectively and individually, cross a variety of stylistic boundaries, interacting with and absorbing energies from the great wide world of music. There are influences from folk, jazz, blues, progressive rock, and performance art, within a classical music context. There is a deep indebtedness to technology (five of the works include electronics) as well as to the most profound sensibilities of pre-Industrial cultures.

Michael Lowenstern is one of the premier bass clarinetists in the world. He is equally comfortable with the subtlest of gestural nuances in Arthur Kreiger’s Joint Session, the timbral variety of Mark Gibbons’s What I’m Getting At, the dizzying virtuoso challenges of Perry Goldstein’s Total Absorption, and the evocative spirituality of both Jerome Kitzke’s Regina Takes the Holy Road, 3 December 1994, and Robert Rowe's folk-inspired Shells. He idiomatically projects the relaxed and bluesy language of Peter Winkler’s Solitaire and Gershwin's Summertime, and lyrical sweetness pervades his own But Would She Remember You? For raw power, there is the take-no-prisoners directness of Spasm and the last moments of Daniel Weymouth’s Rare Events.

As this recording makes compellingly clear, no technical difficulty daunts him, and no stylistic sensibility eludes him. Each of these works explores, exploits, and expands in a unique way the remarkable expressive range of this wonderful instrument.