Saxophonist/flutist Lew Tabackin says he was encouraged to record this set by jazz photographer Jimmy Katz: sessions went ahead at a drum store in Manhattan and in Tabackin's own basement. Tabackin's first album as leader, released in 1974, bore the title (in one version at least) of Let the Tape Roll, so he's a veteran of both improvised set-ups and the improvising mindset as a player. Having cut his teeth in TV show bands, he performed with the likes of Shelley Manne and has devoted a large part of his energies to a big band/jazz orchestra run with his wife, the multi-Grammy-nominated Japanese pianist and bandleader Toshiko Akiyoshi. He was also the saxophonist on the classic early Tom Waits album Small Change (1976). Mixing originals with covers of Kern (a nicely neo-baroque ‘Yesterdays’, with Tabackin on flute) and John Lewis (‘Afternoon in Paris’), Soundscapes is a less radical statement, although the leader's playing retains a gritty freshness of sound and invention throughout. Bebop lines and Ellingtonian arrangements have been major elements in his collaborations with Akiyoshi, and they're combined again here in Tabackin's ‘derangement’ of Ellington's ‘Sunset and the Mocking Bird’, where, on flute, he quotes Charlie Parker in his opening solo. “I hope Duke purists are not too offended,” he gently offers in the liner note.