If walls could talk, there would be a lot of chatter coming from the midtown Manhattan practice studio of saxophonist David Alan Gross. No less than fifteen mounted poster size photos shine down depicting a Bird, a Prez, a Prince of Darkness and a Cannonball tearing up some changes for lunch. "Every time I walk through the door and look up at those guys," says Gross shaking his head, "they seem to be reminding me that tne journey never ends."

The Lines=of=Reason alto man started his musical journey picking up the saxophone at the age of fifteen. The town of White Plains, a suburb of New York City, had a fine high school band program, but the novice teenager had an infinitely better source to learn about jazz. "My dad was a big band nut," nostalgizes Gross. "From the time I can remember I must have heard every Ellington and Basie record that was ever recorded." This was important tor me because when I heard Miles, Monk, Sonny and Trane-the freshness of the music really knocked me out." The sense of freshness and originality is the number one priority that Gross strives to bring to Lines=of=Reason. It has been his main motivation tor virtually all of his past musical endeavors going back to his college years at the Hartt College of Music. "I went to Hartt way before there was a jazz program." He looks back. "I was hoping to improve my craft. But the whole European classical mind set kind of put me off. Don't get me wrong-I've gone through a lot of classical repertoire on flute and I found it enlightening and tech- nically productive," he insists. "But I'm really a jazz player and I felt that I had to leave Hartt after two years and take another road."

The road that the young saxist traveled in the seventies was called back then "The Chitlin Circuit." Almost every club in the Afro-American communities used organ trios and quartets. For the next ten years or so Gross played just about every organ joint within a hundred mile radius of New York City. "I consider myself miraculously fortunate to have been around the organ scene before it died out," recalls Gross. "It was an ideal training ground. You had to play strong with an organ-and no matter if it was an up tempo, standard or a ballad, it always came out funky."

The funky side of the New York saxist came in handy during the eighties. He fre- quently did studio work for pop and R&B singers. It was in 1982 that he met up with a very special jazz singer; Nancy Monroe. "Nancy and I met through a mutual friend," he remembers fondly. "It had nothing to do with music." Within a year the couple were married. The dynamic duo went on to put a band together and worked around the New York area for many years. "We had some great rhythm sections," recalls Gross. "It was a ball, both on and off the bandstand." In 1995 the smitten sax man produced and performed on Monroe's debut CD Dance My Heart on the MJA Record label.

By the late nineties the alto man had appeared as a sideman on a score of CD's including three with drumming great Bob Moses on GramamVision and one with Michael Cochrane entitled The Cutting Edge for Steeplechase Records. But it wasn't until 1997 that the saxophonist did his very first CD as a leader.

"I was no stranger to the recording studio," explains Gross, "but when it's your own CD it different because you take on the role of captain of the ship. The Final Answer to Everything on the MJA record label was so much fun for me because the guys on the date were friends as well as great musicians." Combining friendship with top of the line musicianship pretty much sums up the concept of Lines=of=Reason. "Michael had been kicking the idea around for quite some time," says Gross, "so when he called me to do it, there was never really any doubt in my mind that it would work. It made me think tor a minute about the monster players on the wall of my studio. Their message seems even more meaningful and prophetic now-the journey never ends."

FOR MORE INFO ON DAVID ALAN GROSS VISIT HIS WEBSITE