Beyond being topical and the text being a great blessing on it's own merits, this piece has been such a blessing in my life. It's the first track on John Hollenbeck's large ensemble album of the same name, and shortly after it was recorded John came and played some of the music with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra. I was in undergrad in Akron at the time, and just getting started as an arranger let alone a composer, and after the first rehearsal several of the faculty from the band sought me out to make sure I was coming to the concert because they knew I would be into it.

Seeing that concert and briefly meeting John afterwards to see he was such a normal and kind human being was an incredibly pivotal point in my life. It changed how I thought about music, and what was "allowed" when writing music let alone pieces for a jazz ensemble. Those are heady sentences to think about given what I currently do... but they're no less true. It made me think about what was possible, and believe that things were possible I didn't even know about before that point.

Musically the chart is about as far from a standard big band piece as you can get, which is kind of the point if you ask John about the original intent when he wrote it. Besides that, it's beautiful, and haunting, and hopeful and wistful all at once. Besides all that, it contains what I think is a defining characteristic of John's music for me which is an inherent and unapologetic honesty. It does not pretend, but if it's pretentious I really feel that that has more to do with what the listener brings to it than anything John wrote.

Some of this is true independent of my own experience, but obviously a lot of it is because of how things intersected with who I am, who I was, where I was, and a thousand other things. I hope that whether it's musical or otherwise that you experience something like this in your life at some point because man; what a blessing when it happens.