From the recording Ginder's Garden (for Grant)

When I began writing the music, I was thinking a lot about how grateful I was for the amazing teachers that I have been blessed with in my life. Sadly, one of them, Grant Wolf, my Jazz band director from Mesa Community College (MCC in Mesa, AZ) and my first ‘musical father’, passed away in August 2002 and it was then that I realized who I was writing the piece for. The Jazz band at MCC was called “Ginder’s Garden of Jazz.” Thus the title, and the dedication.