On the eve of a West Coast tour with Slow Poke, the coming release of their album, "Redemption" (Intuition) and his forthcoming second solo release, "Drift", New York saxophonist Michael Blake talks about the roots of his life in music and the way the branches have sprouted along the way. Amongst his many activities, the Canadian-born Blake is leader of the groups Michael Blake's Free Association (which recorded Blake's debut solo CD, "Kingdom of Champa") and his latest venture,

It is a shame that Vancouver, BC singer Kate Hammett-Vaughan has been performing for 30 years, starting as a child in church choirs in her native Nova Scotia, and this is her first CD as leader of her own group. But the deprivation will be more easily borne now that she has released "How My Heart Sings", a collection of standards on the Canadian label Maximum Jazz which includes slightly lesser-known, and certainly not over-recorded, tunes by Duke Ellington, Cole Porter and Thelonious Monk. …