In the summer of 2001, Geoff Haslam, who produced Eddie Harris, Herbie Mann, The Velvet Underground, The MC5, Bette Midler and the J.Geils Band for Atlantic Records and Hugh Masakela for Pendulum Records, decided to record a jazz album. He felt that popular music, including jazz, had become robotic due to recording methods, and that the spontaneity of jazz could be resurrected by recording musicians in a more traditional way, like sessions in the fifties and sixties.