The notion struck about three quarters of the way through the recording of this album: Jankees. My mind popped jankies, and then recalled Yankees (or the other way around), the 1983 album by Derek Bailey, George Lewis, and John Zorn. Hearing it for the first time was my first exposure to these three musicians and probably my first exposure to the inculcations and inn-/out-er logics of free improvisation per se. It's still a stunning listen. And anything 'anki/ees stuns me to adolescent tumult: hankies for tears, bankies for pilfering arcade quarters (see also: crying), wankies for...and concluding, actual Yankees games, littered expressway car(apace)s/scout-side safety netting/framed sky/the smell of it all (angst, betting, clammy calamity called amity)/yet a milieu never quite clicking. So, uneasy, new, some of it stuck-struck me, this, now, Jankees homage, upvote, regression, candidness, offering, reunion, love, opportunity, long arc friendship/musical embeddedness under an uncertain cloud, that one/many, of what it means to have in-group, to have ritual, to have celebration/health, to have exclusion/weight/death. Who picks up? But the good: Samuel Burt and I go back many years to before his time in Baltimore. He's been a trusted foil and fellow adventurer over the years, bringing an ever-playful seriousness to his wide range of expression, here daxophone mastery, the slippery dream vocalizer of Hans Reichel creation and bent. And Jeff Crouch who has lived many lives alongside mine, finding a complete sweetness in his trumpet dedication that really made this session (and makes this artistic stage) fun and memorable. Plus the computer insertions, a(n)(inter(re)active composite of Samuel & Jeff's airborne vibrations. I stuck-struck with contact mics on a fretted plane. These activities counteract the insular and narrow. And I hope this is received in the spirit through which I discovered the Yankees album (yes/uneasy/new/there's something there); guitar trombone saxophone is something/that-something akin to guitar trumpet daxophone; complexity abounds and there's infinite room for an infinite multiplicity of pronunciations. The expressway is dear and dear, necessarily fraught and newly clarifying, and steering the stadium (us! US!) to something much, much better.