Hi gang, been a while!! As some of you know, I've been working with Don Was on various projects for much of the year, including Charles Lloyd & Lucinda Williams brilliant album Vanished Gardens featuring Bill Frisell and the just-released Blue Note Review2 box. Yesterday, while in Buena Park to attend the annual awards event for the LA/OC Audio Society Don and I accepted the award on Wayne Shorter's behalf for Audiophile Record of the Year for his 3-LP masterpiece Emanon. (Wayne was in DC receiving Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award ..... literally at the same time as the event in Buena Park.

Don and I decided to take the opportunity to also announce a new series of LP only releases that I'll be producing to be called the Tone Poet Series. (Tone Poet is a nickname that Charles Lloyd gave me many years ago when we were working on his ECM albums.) This series will consist of 18 never before reissued releases from Blue Note and also BN associated labels like Solid State, Pacific Jazz and World Pacific. We'll also be diving into some of the modern BN catalog in this series.

It's no secret that Don Was has been a long time, very vocal admirer of what Ron Rambach and I have done with our Music Matters Blue Note reissues. Accordingly, this series is being produced exactly the same way, with the kind of intense attention to mastering, pressing and packaging that Ron and I put into each and every Music Matters release. The Tone Poet series will be mastered by Kevin Gray at his excellent Cohearent Mastering facility and the LPs will be pressed under Rick Hashimoto's supervision at RTI. Jackets will be the same high quality you know so well from Music Matters and will be produced by the great team at Stoughton Printing. I'll wait for the actual announcement to give you the complete list, but I will confirm the first two titles: Chick Corea's masterpiece trio session with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes- Now He Sings, Now He Sobs and Wayne Shorters incredible quartet session with Herbie Hancock, Cecil McBee and Joe Chambers called Etcetera. I actually don't know final pricing yet but I think you can assume it will be under $40. The series will kick off in Feb, 2019 with these two titles and will continue until .... who knows. Until you guys stop buying them I guess! Enjoy! Joe Harley

Any word on the sources, Joe? Will KG be working off the actual Tapes or Files?

KG and I work from actual master tapes, never files. There are a couple of exceptions from the modern BN era where the actual master is digital but we're taking great care there as well. Availability will be worldwide as these are being distributed through Universal Music.