We have new music coming out this summer and fall. That includes the new Linda Oh album Initial Here releasing next Tuesday and another by young Chicago bassist Matt Ulery called By A Little Light will hit later in June. But we’re also putting out some older music, some of which you might have heard before.

Magic Triangle was my first Dave Douglas album. I first heard The Infinite actually, but MT is the one that my local record store (remember those?) had. I remember giving it a spin the first time and falling head over heals almost immediately. Lucky for me, that dude who helped shape my view of jazz in college is now the dude who signs my paycheck. And MT will likely always be my favorite record of Dave’s no matter how much mind-blowing stuff turns up in my inbox——you always have a soft spot in your heart for your first after all.

That quartet was burning. Seriously burning. So burning in fact that Greenleaf decided early this year to embark on our first, and certainly not our last, reissue project. And that was to combine Magic Triangle and the other equally-burning album, Leap Of Faith, that utilized this lineup: Dave, Chris Potter, James Genus, and Ben Perowsky. Both were released by Arabesque in the nineties, and now have a fresh release here at Greenleaf.

We took the original photographs and cover art, added a bit, and pressed an 3-fold digipak on super-thick 100% recycled paper stock. It’s a textured matte finish that feels and looks really great. The two discs are the remastered original source audio. There are liner notes by Dave included with the original thank-you’s as well.

One other thing that Dave wanted to do to help bolster the reissue was to press a book of all the charts for the compositions he wrote for this quartet. We do a lot of digital sheet music books at the Greenleaf store that you can print off and place in your 3-ring or folder or what-have-you. But for this project, we wanted to give the charts a more solid home, so we assembled them with some of the original handwritten scores from Dave’s archive in a sturdy spiral-bound set. The charts are printed on heavy paper so there’s no bleed through, and the longer (read: 3-pg) charts have a page fold for easy reading without any page turns. Some additional liner notes by Dave about the charts are there, too.

We hope that all this will help reintroduce these works and albums to the new school of musicians out there.

Even if you’ve heard this music before, we hope you’ll go back through this music. There will always be surprises if you’re listening.