Phil Lentz Presents… Still Holds Three Places in His Spotify Top Ten
6 min read
Phil Lentz Presents... Still Holds Three Places in His Spotify Top Ten
A Keys, Guitar, Bass and Drums Quartet Carries Ten of the Debut’s Eleven Tracks
Three of the ten songs Spotify lists as Phil Lentz‘s most popular come from his 2022 debut, Phil Lentz Presents…. All three are keyboard-led jazz and pop instrumentals: Icy Cool sits fifth, Schumann’s Theme seventh and Bluesy eighth. Lentz plays them with Dennis Harte on guitar, Wolfgang Lugomarsini on bass and Kevin Gaffney on drums. Red Heller also joins the band on Bluesy.
Phil Lentz’s Bluesy plays in our Jazz, Classical, Cinematic playlist below. Meanwhile, the Phil Lentz artist profile lists every article about his records. Phil Lentz Presents… reached us through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Press play on Bluesy first, then keep reading for the arrangements and the recording.
Phil Lentz Presents… Collects Eleven Lentz Compositions Arranged With Guitarist and Producer Dennis Harte
Lentz wrote every piece on the album, and it came out on 28 September 2022. He arranged the songs with Harte, who also produced the record. Lentz hones his songs in jazz workshops at New York clubs. The Bitter End in Greenwich Village is one of those rooms. He has also played keyboards in bands and workshops at the Iridium, the Cutting Room, Shrine and Silvana’s.
That club history explains the scale of the writing. The whole album runs just under half an hour, and most tracks finish inside three minutes. Only one passes four: Where Are All the People, at 4:25. It is also the only song on the record with lyrics. Everything else is an instrumental theme sized for a working band. Meanwhile, the writing mixes jazz with folk and rock instead of sticking to one tradition.
The debut opened a run of three albums. It also set the format the later records kept: original tunes, short running times and a steady core of players. The press noticed early, too. MuzicNotez reviewed the album in December 2022, three months after release. The review placed it in the mood of a Manhattan jazz club, which is exactly where these songs began.
A Quartet on Seven Tracks, a Quintet on Three and a Solo Keyboard Closing Lullaby
The streaming credits show how the arrangements divide. Lentz plays keyboards throughout, backed by Harte on guitar, Lugomarsini on bass and Gaffney on drums. That four-piece plays seven tracks on its own, including Icy Cool and Schumann’s Theme. Lentz has called Schumann’s Theme a soft rock song. It grew from a passage of Robert Schumann’s piano piece Soaring. So the quartet’s guitar and drums frame a melody with roots in the Romantic piano repertoire.
Heller, credited for vocals and alto saxophone, joins the quartet on three tracks. They are Bluesy, That Far Away Look and Where Are All the People. Only the last has words, so Heller’s other two credits fall on instrumentals. Finally, the closing Lullaby removes the band entirely. Lentz alone takes the credit there, and the piece runs barely over a minute. As a result, it is the only track without the rhythm section.
That quartet line-up has a well-known model in jazz. Chick Corea is one of the influences Lentz names. In the mid-1970s, Corea led Return to Forever with Al Di Meola’s electric guitar beside the keyboards. Stanley Clarke and Lenny White completed the band on bass and drums. Lentz uses the same four instruments at a far smaller scale. Instead of long fusion workouts, he writes themes that end before most fusion solos would start.
The saxophone has a model too. James Taylor, another name on that list, put an alto in the middle of a folk-pop single in 1975. On How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You), David Sanborn played the solo. The record then reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Similarly, Heller’s alto brings a horn into a keyboard and guitar band.
Two New Jersey Tracking Rooms, a Greenpoint Mix by Alex Lipsen and Tom Hutten’s Master
The recording passed through several sets of hands. First, the band tracked at two New Jersey studios: Studio Mozart in Little Falls and Kaleidoscope Sound in Union City. Kaleidoscope is a two-room facility that opened in 2001. Its main room runs a 48-channel API console, and its clients have included Bill Frisell and the Mingus Big Band.
Next, Alex Lipsen mixed the album at Russell Street Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Tom Hutten of Bionic Mastering then mastered it, and Kat Georges designed the sleeve. In other words, the songs moved from New Jersey rooms to a Brooklyn mix, then to a mastering specialist.
Harte’s role ties the chain together. Besides producing and co-arranging the album, he has worked in studios as an engineer and a session musician. He has also toured as a guitarist. On this record, only one track has a lyric. Therefore, the balance between keyboard, guitar and saxophone carries the whole presentation. The credits put someone with an engineer’s background in charge of that balance.
Phil Lentz Presents… Streams on Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp, With Bitter End Footage on YouTube
Phil Lentz Presents… suits listeners who like keyboard-led jazz at pop length. It also suits pop listeners who want instrumentals that state a tune and move on. For example, readers who came to jazz through Return to Forever’s front line will find the line-up familiar. So will anyone who remembers the saxophone breaks on 1970s folk-pop radio. Start with the three ranked tracks, and then let the album play in order.
From the BestMusic.News Curator Team: “Gospel is the track we would add to the three on his Spotify list. At 3:20, it is the second-longest piece on the album. It also gives the quartet more room than almost anything else here.”
The band also plays these songs live. Videos from its set at the Bitter End are on Lentz’s YouTube channel. For new listeners, that footage is the quickest way to see the line-up behind the record.
Hear Phil Lentz Presents… on Apple Music and Bandcamp. The follow-up album is on Spotify and Bandcamp. Follow Phil Lentz across platforms: Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X and Bluesky, or visit his official website.
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