Michael PaGÁn/ Colorado Saxophone Quartet

In the liner notes to 12 Preludes and Fugues, Michael Pagán writes about how, as a jazz musician, he's always had a fascination with the saxophone, and, as a composer, with counterpoint. So on a whim, he wrote a fugue for four voices, and he immediately heard it for saxophones. Within a few days, he'd written a few more fugues and then decided to write a prelude for each one. While some of the 24 tracks here contain jazz improvisation, others are written in jazz style without improvisation, and some are steeped in third stream and neo-classical. The Colorado Saxophone Quartet (founded by Pete Lewis in 1997 and including Clare Church, Tom Myer, Andrew Stonerock and Kurtis Adams) does an extraordinary job of interpreting the pieces, which were recorded in CU-Boulder's Grusin Music Hall. The saxophonists have total control over their horns, both in tone and articulation, and it's clear why Pagán chose the quartet to interpret his sublime works.