If a new George Freeman album is always a blessing, then what is a new George Freeman album featuring two world class backing bands? That’s the riddle we’ll need to solve as we spend more time with his newest CD, The Good Life. George is joined on the first half of the album by Joey DeFrancesco and Lewis Nash and on the second half of the disc, by Christian McBride and Carl Allen. These songs, five by George, and two standards (“If I Had You” and “The Good Life”) are all beautifully played, with George’s brilliant tone and musical ideas front and center on “Mr. D” (George’s tribute to Joey DeFrancesco). “1,2,3,4” has a Chicago to New Orleans groove happening that is slick and fun, and that tone with Christian McBride’s big bass notes? That’s a good time, indeed.

The names of Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff do not necessarily conjure images and sounds of jazz in one's mind, that is until one has listened to recordings by the Classical Jazz Quartet. Although these musicians utilize the same instruments as the Modern Jazz Quartet, they are in no way clones or copycats of that groundbreaking group. They have very much their own sound and style. This is not surprising given the huge talent of the musicians involved; all four are virtuosos on their respective instruments. The themes, although composed in a different time and place, become excellent vehicles for complex, sometimes, bluesy, often swinging and always fresh improvisations in the hands of these musicians.

There have been a number of famous jazz artists whose offspring have followed their father's footsteps into music, think only of Ellis Marsalis and his sons, Dewey and Joshua Redman, Papa John and Joey DeFrancesco, Bucky and John Pizzarelli, Walter and Nicholas Payton and Harry Connick Senior & Junior.

The Classical Jazz Quartet Kenny Barron on piano, Ron Carter on bass, Stefon Harris on vibraphone and marimba, and Lewis Nash on drums seems to begin where the Modern Jazz Quartet of the 1950s left off, right down to the CJQ initials that seem to evoke memories of the earlier group. Bach was the staple of the classical-music treatments the MJQ released.