Jazz
Self-released · 2026
Jeffrey Lasky is a guitarist and composer from Chicago and a “technologist by day”, by his own description. Since September 2022 he has released thirty-seven singles and no album. “Along the Midway Plaisance” is the first, and eight of its eleven tracks had already come out one at a time: “When It Rains in Rome” and “Correlation and Causation” in February 2025, “Tripoli” in September, “For Which It Stands” in October, and “Viaje Del Sol”, “Ted’s Bounce”, “In Your Light” and “Every Day I Think of You” over the course of 2026.
The thread is geographical. The Midway Plaisance is the Chicago park that joins Washington Park to Jackson Park, and the three previously unreleased tracks — “Fountain of Time”, “What Remains” and “Knight of Blaník Mountain” — finish off the route. Lasky names John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola, Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny among his influences; what comes through closest is the acoustic, Spanish-textured Metheny of “New Chautauqua” and “Beyond the Missouri Sky”.
Thirty-nine minutes and fifty-seven seconds, with well-recorded layers of guitar and a wide sound-stage. The singles origin shows in the whole, which moves in three- and four-minute episodes with nothing tying them together: there is a piece of just over two minutes (“Knight of Blaník Mountain”) next to a block of five (“In Your Light”), and the running order does not quite build a journey. The two pieces where the record steps away from the dominant acoustic tone are “Fountain of Time”, with electric guitar, keyboards and bass, and “Correlation and Causation”, with changes of time signature and Moog-like keyboards; they are also the ones that best hold up to repeated listening. The album is still not listed as such on either iTunes or Deezer: only the singles that make it up.
Rating: 6.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents