Hot off the press. Fresh from the oven.

I've been doing some writing in the style of my forte -- smooth jazz, pop instrumental, whatever you'd like to call it. If you'd like to listen, right click the link and save it to your machine.

You might need to turn it up on your machine because, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to normalize my tracks against other CD tracks. I master it as loud as it will go without clipping.

Anyway, the track is called "Nick the Quick," the name deriving from my nephew, who is quite the handful. It features a lot of the pop melody that I normally write but with a bit more funk in the middle.

As I progress in writing these instrumentals, for the sake of both time and your ears, I forego trying to write fancy solos to go with these tunes. Takes too long.

My hope is that I can talk my Internet pal and musical colleague extraordinaire, Oklahoma sax god Chris Hicks, into writing/playing a sax line to accompany this, to give it more umph and soul. With just a keyboard, it's tough to give a tune much authenticity.

But, alas, it's the way I roll. It's still damned cool that I can write, record right from my front room ...

Feel free to post comments on the tune ... You won't hurt my feelings one bit.