Two Loons for Tea is a guitar/vocal duo from Seattle.  I never would have heard of them except for a mention on the Fredheads mailing list which mentioned the huge body of amazing Seattle-area musicians participating on the CD, including Brad Houser, Eyvind Kang, Dale Fanning, Jessica Lurie, Mike Dillon and the inimitable Skerik.  The more I delve into the Seattle music scene, the more juicy nuggets I dig out.  While Two Loons for Tea is most definately pretty straight ahead pop, the contributions of all these musicians is definately evident and it is a most entertaining album.

Incidently, I noticed that Jeff Bezos, the man behind Amazon.com was somehow involved in this album.  A little research revealed that Jonathan Kochmer, the guitarist, was one of the first 10 employees at Amazon, developing a lot of the backend software that ran the early ecommerce pioneer.  He was making music with Sarah Scott, the vocalist, when he was offered the job. 

This is the best Charlie Parker compilation I've heard.  Rhino almost always does a good job with these and this is no exception hitting almost all the high points from his Savoy, Dial and Verve recordings and with liner notes as good as the music.  If you're looking for somewhere to start with Bird, this is the place. 

A great album. I first bought the Trio's 99->00 album and was so impressed with the lineup's chemistry that I had to pick this up as well. This may be Metheny's best trio - Pat on various Guitars, Larry Grenadier on bass and Bill Stewart on drums sound like they can read each other's minds. Every song is incredibly tight. This album, unlike 99->00 which was more straight hard-bop-esque jazz, touches on pretty much all of Metheny's stylistic incarnations, for better or worse. I tend to think better, because this is an incredible group of musicians that can make just about anything interesting.