Mitchel Forman

LP version. Childhood Dreams is a solo piano album by Mitchel Forman, recorded at Barigozzi Studio in Milan on February 6 and 7, 1982. Soul Note released it the same year, the first of the two solo records he made for the label. Forman, born in Brooklyn, studied at the Manhattan School of Music and toured with Gerry Mulligan, in his big band and quartet, then with Stan Getz. His solo career had begun in 1980 with a piano set at the Newport Jazz Festival, released as his first album, Live at Newport.

This is Forman alone at the keyboard across nine pieces, most of them between five and seven minutes. The title track opens the record, followed by Max And Poony, Lost Numbers and Anthem; Just Ideas, at almost seven minutes, is the longest. The close is brief: a version of the standard There Is No Greater Love under two minutes, then Farewell at about two. The early 1980s were a busy studio period for him in New York, and his own biography lists work in those years with Phil Woods, Carla Bley and Mel Tormé. Then came a year and a half in John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu, with the albums Mahavishnu and Adventures in Radioland. Work with Wayne Shorter on Phantom Navigator followed, a long way from the acoustic, unaccompanied playing of this session.

This is the original 1982 Soul Note LP, catalogue SN 1050, a 140-gram copy from the first pressing that CAM Jazz, owner of the Soul Note catalogue, rediscovered in its vaults.