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For more than two decades as a solo artist and Grammy-winning producer, Joe Henry has worked with some of the most celebrated names in music, including Ornette Coleman, Elvis Costello, Allen Toussaint, T-Bone Burnett, Don Byron, Solomon Burke, Brad Mehldau, Madonna, and Ani DiFranco.

On Blood from Stars, his remarkable and sprawling new album, Henry has the unprecedented pleasure of introducing the world to a new talent, a young saxophonist by the name of Levon Henry. "I was tempted to put him on my last record, Civilians (2007)," Henry explains of his seventeen-year-old son. "He wasn't quite ready for that –and neither was I. But in the last two years, he's found a voice and begun to speak in wildly expansive and complete sentences. It wasn't a matter of me thinking it would be cute to put him on a record. He was just the musician I most wanted to hear in that chair."

It doesn't take long to understand why. An award-winning player in his own right – he's won two soloist awards at the Monterey Jazz Festival's "Next Generation" competitions – Levon lends his velvety tone and lyrical phrasing to songs such as "Truce," and the instrumental "Over Her Shoulder," which his father wrote as a vehicle for him. Nowhere is his playing more incandescent than on "Stars." His soprano sax leaps and darts with a melodic agility and a terse beauty.

The album was recorded in Henry's own studio, which is located in the basement of the historic Garfield Home in South Pasadena, where Henry and his family now live. (An historical landmark, it was built in 1904 for the President's widow.) This made Levon's contributions that much easier. "Sometimes we had to do overdubs with him as opposed to recording him live, because he was at school," Henry recalls. "But then he'd come home, finish his homework, and come downstairs to join the festivities. It was lovely and strange, and yet it felt perfectly n.......
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