New York, as they say, is a small town, so perhaps it’s not so strange that the Jazz Passengers would wind up working with Deborah Harry. After all, various Passengers have been hauling their horns around the city’s club circuit since the early Eighties, when saxophonist Roy Nathanson and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes began working with the Lounge Lizards. And Harry, of course, was the queen of clubs from the moment she and her band Blondie first blew the roof off of CBGB’s in 1974.

They worked the same streets, but Harry and her future collaborators were separated by something bigger than their neighborhood: The singer’s slicked-up variation on punk could never fit easily into the smoother contours of avant-jazz. One slammed while the other—in an ironic way, at least--swung.

Or so it seemed in those pre-postmodern days. In the Nineties, anything is possible—which often means that any collision of styles, no matter how bloody, is valid. For all the cross-pollination going on between the rock, jazz, hip-hop, and classical communities, rare is the artist who jumps a stylistic hurdle and arrives on the other side with a real understanding of what the aesthetic there is all about.

Deborah Harry is one of the few who have made the leap....
 

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