Welcome to "Volume Two," the second offering from the Professors of Pleasure, Tulane University's Jazz Faculty band. In addition to some jazz standards ("Half Nelson," "This I Dig of You"), a sumptuous ballad ("Nancy with the Laughing Face") and a 'second-line' version of the rallying cry for Tulane's Green Wave football team ("Tulane Fight Song"), we've also thrown in a number of originals from band members as well as two tracks by the great New Orleans composer, musician and jazz educator Harold Battiste.

 The Professors of Pleasure: Tulane University Faculty Quintet, are an aggregate of longtime jazz faculty instructors (bassist Jim Markway) and new, post-Katrina hires brought onboard by jazz performance studies department coordinator John Doheny.

THE PLAYERS:

 ONE UP, TWO BACK

"This tune is an example of just how much mileage you can get out of two diminished scales and a couple of dominant seventh chords. The ridiculously long form was originally even longer. I'd wanted to write something with a long and contrasting solo form like Mingus' "Sue's Changes", and so the original version had a big rhapsodic ballad section in the middle of it, which I eventually decided was just too much. Everybody carries on in a grand fashion on this one, especially our very special guest pianist, Tony Foster."