By Shirley Klett, Cadence Magazine, July 1991

ED BICKERT/LORNE LOFSKY, THIS IS NEW, CONCORD CD 4414

These two Canadians , the veteran Ed Bickert and the youthful Lorne Lofsky, are among the best jazz guitarists in the world today. Ed played with top Canadian groups for some years and was highly thought of by those who heard him, but did not come to the attention of the wider jazz public until Paul Desmond began playing and recording with him. Lofsky began in rock and roll, got bored with it, and made the transition to jazz with Ed Bckert’s guitar style as a major influence. He hadn’t been playing long in Toronto clubs when Oscar Peterson heard him and produced his first record on Pablo Today. While each guitarist has his own individual style, both are concerned with harmonic development, both are very sensitive in accompaniment, and both use only as many notes as are necessary to develop their ideas. “Maybe You’ll Be There” is Ed’s solo showcase and Ellington’s “Star Crossed Lovers”  was selected by Lofsky for his feature. This quartet has been playing club dates in Toronto for the past five years and they work together with rare understanding. An earlier recording by this group appeared on the Canadian Unisson label and was declared to be a “musical highlight of the new year”. Their new Concord is, if possible, even better. Recommend.

By Paul Wells, The Gazette, Montreal, Monday, October 22, 1990

ED BICKERT/LORNE LOFSKY – This is New (Concord)

Did somebody mention introverts? Hello, Ed Bickert. The so-cool dean of Canadian pickers, Bickert seems to be playing in his sleep. But his stripped-down melodicism and metholated charm show how aware he really is.

Lorne Lofsky, another Torontonian but rather younger, is a good match for Bickert. Lofsky’s playing is just a touch more modern than Bickert’s perpetual mis-50’s cool, his tone just a bit harder-edged.

Together, they ease through a bunch of standards (Namely You, The Star Crossed Lovers), neither rushing nor competing. Bassist Neil Swainson and drummer Jerry Fuller take the hint, and deliver more restrained accompaniment than we’re used to hearing from them.

It’s all very polite. Jazz for a Sunday afternoon with your favorite sweater and your dog. It’s also first-rate.

By John Howard, L.A. Jazz Scene Magazine, September 1990

Concord Jazz has a couple of delights to keep you going. Check out guitarists Ed Bickery and Lorne Lofsky and their THIS IS NEW (CCD4414). Neil Swainson on bass and Jerry Fuller on drums help out as their perform Horace Silver’s “Ecaroh,” and Cedar Walton’s “Ugetsu,” among others. One word tells it all: OUTSTANDING!

*** 1/2 ED BICKERT & LORNE LOFSKY “This is New” Concord Jazz :

Two prominent Toronto guitarists–Bickert, 57, and Lofsky, 36–join with two of Canada’s best rhythm purveyors, bassist Neal Swainson and drummer Jerry Fuller, for a low-key collaboration on tunes mainly written by fellow jazzmen (Wes Montgomery, Cedar Walton, Horace Silver, Steve Swallow). Each has a solo track; Lofsky’s harmonic grace is well displayed in the Ellington-Strayhorn “Star Crossed Lovers.” Both men deal ingeniously with Charlie Parker’s contrapuntal theme “Ah Leu Cha.” A superior sampling of north-of-the-border jazz.

by LEONARD FEATHER

View Original Review Here

By Will Smith for Jazz Sounds, Sunday World-Herald, Omaha, NE, July 15, 1990

Ed Bickert and Lorne Lofsky are a couple of Canadian guitarists who are already widely known in jazz circles. One would hope that their recorded get-together, “This is New” (Concord Jazz CCD-4414), will find many new fans.

Supported by two of their countrymen, Bassist Neil Swainson and drummer Jerry Fuller, Bickert and Lofsky weave single-noye lines and chords in lyrical, spontaneous and loosely swinging fashion here. Four Stars.

Ed Bickert and Lorne Lofsky, “This is New” Concord Jazz, ***1/4

By Leonard Feather, The Jazz link, San Diego, CA, July 1990

Two prominent Toronto guitarists…Bickert, 57, and Lofsky, 36…join with two of Canada’s best rhythm purveyors, bassist Neil Swainson and drummer Jerry Fuller, for a low key collaboration on tunes mainly written by fellow jazzmen (Wes Montgomery, Cedar Walton, Horace Silver, Steve Swallow). Each has a solo track; Lofsky’s harmonic grace is well displayed in Billy Strayhorn’s “Star Crossed Lovers.” Both men deal ingeniously wth Charlie Parker’s contrapuntal theme “Ah Leu Cha.” A superior sampling of north-of-the-border jazz.

By Richard S. Ginell, Daily News, Los Angeles, CA, Friday, June 1, 1990

THIS IS NEW/Ed Bickert/Lorne Lofsky
Our rating: three stars

The title notwithstanding (it is the name of the leadoff Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin tune), there is nothing really new here in a progressive sense. Rather, this is an engaging opportunity to catch up with guitarist Ed Bickert, one of Canada’s better-kept secrets (Concord Jazz CCD-4414).

Bickert tends to stay at home in the Toronto area, out of the reach of the publicity mills, so Concord often goes to Canada to record him. Here, an all-Canadian team of bassist Neil Swainson, drummer Jerry Fuller and guitarist Lorne Lofsky, join Bickert in aswinging, smooth-as-glass, hourlong set of mostly out-of-the-way pop and jazz standards.

Far from being overmatched, the young Lofsky offers a sharply etched, equally inventive counterpoint to the subdued yet tasty imagination of Bickert. Along the way, both glide through some relaxing mainstream grooves.

By Mark Miller – The Globe and Mail, Monday, April 20, 1981

On the night of October 18, 1952, Wray Downes of Toronto was playing piano at the Saile Playei in Paris as a member of trumpater Bill Coleman’s Swing Stars, alongside the likes of trombonist Dickie Wells and drummer Zutty Singleton. The concert was taped, and the resulting re;lease stands as Downes’ first appearance on record. He was 21.

It would be 25 years before Downes would make his second appearance on a jazz recording, having returned to Canada in 1956 and to Toronto in 1958. That record was drummer Pete Magadini’s Bones Blues from 1977. Now, and finally, Wray Downes, at 50 one of Canada’s premiere jazz musicians, has the first record he can call his own: Au Privave, a joint effort with bassist Dave Young, released recently by the local label, Sackville. It’s a collection of solos, duets and, with guitarist Ed Bickert as a guest, trios. Its elegant, full of heart and depth. It’s also about time.

Wray Downes’ experience makes the story behind the first record of Toronto guitarist Lorne Lofsky, It Could Happen to You, for the important California label Pablo, all the more remarkable. What happened to Lofsky rarely happens to Canadian jazz musicians.

In 1979, Lofsky was making good impression on his elders, including Ed Bickert (in whose place he played on occasion with the same Wray Downes and Dave Young; it’s a small world). On Bickert’s recommendation, he got a week’s worth of work with alto saxophonist Jerry Toth at George’s Spaghetti House.

Enter trombonist Butch Watanabe. Lofsky picks up the story: “Butch heard me a play a set or two with Jerry, and I guess he liked it. He said ‘I’m playing here in a couple of weeks; can you make it?’ Just like that.”

Enter Oscar Peterson, a close friend of Watanabe from the days of Montreal’s Cafe St-Michel in the forties and now the central musician of Pablo Records. “Butch had a couple of tunes on the gig that Oscar wrote. So Oscar came down, I got to meet him – it was just to meet him; I shook his paw…And I thought he was just being polite – he’s a real gentleman – when he said, ‘Hey man, you really sounded good.’

“So that was that; but a couple of months later, out of the blue, he called me up. ‘I don’t want to alarm you or anything, but are you signed with any record company? Do you want to make a record for Pablo? We’ll take it from there and see what happens.'”

Sometime later, a year ago last Wednesday to be exact, Peterson himself to Lofsky, bassist Kieran Overs and drummer Joe Bendzsa into a Toronto studio and, in five hours, cut the guitarist’s first record. Lofsky was 25.

Like Downes’ LP, Lofsky’s appeared in Toronto stores late last month (following its release in the United States earlier this year). At that rate – two albums a month – there would be an unlikely 24 new records by Canadian jazz musicians by year’s end. In truth, half that many would signal a good year in a country where “best-selling” figures for a record by a domestic jazz musician are in the neighborhood of 5,000, and an average seller might reach 2,000 after a few years on the market.

The ledger for 1981 looks like this: on the debit side, sets from last December by the Boss Brass (recorded at The El Mocambo) and by the Ed Bickert/Don Thompson duo have hit snags, and the planned second album by the Michael Stuart/Keith Blackley band was shelved in January and the band itself folded soon after.

On the credit side, Montreal’s Bug Alley is doing reasonably well in the United States; Toronto’s Shox Johnson and the Jive Bombers are due any day with their first (the only project from last December to be realized); and a new Toronto label, Innovation, affiliated with the McClear Place Studios, has records by tenorman Eugene Amaro and singer Ivy Steele almost in place. Guitarist Rob Carroll recorded for New York’s Inner City recently, and another local guitarist Ken Ramm, has had an album awaiting U.S. release for quite some time.

Meanwhile pianists Eric Harry and Richard Whitehouse have tapes all ready to go, and saxophonist Ron Allen took the situation a step further to produce his own album, Leftovers, for his own Black Silk label. It’s doing well in Vancouver, he reports, but already it is out of date; the band that he leads with bassist David Piltch, currently called I.D. is already on to something else. It is one of the prices a creative jazz musician pays in Canada: to move at all is to move faster than the recording industry.

Downes is as usual incommunicado – this is an intensely private man – but a year ago he offered a philosophical explanation of his career. The explanation, together with the nature of the jazz recording industry in Canada, puts AU Privave into perspective. “I’ve always thought of myself as a late bloomer, and I’ve never been one to get out there and do something before I’m ready to do it.” At this point, the cast of his art has set and hardened, and for once it is on display, but probably too late to alter the direction of his career, whether he’s ready or not.

A year ago, Lofsky was also philosophical about the way things were going. “I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity. Whether the record’s well received – I hope it is, but if it isn’t, it won’t bother me – the point is, somebody thought I played well enough to record me for a label like that.”

A year later, and Lofsky is back at George’s, where it all started. His trio closed there Saturday night, and he stays on to play for Jerry Toth this week. The release of It Could Happen to You hasn’t yet brought him anything new, locally, save some airplay and one negative review (hwich is balanced by generally positive reaction south of the border).

“It’s not really representative of my playing anymore,” he noted last week, and his work at George’s backs up his words without diminishing the music  on the record. “I’ve got a feeling,” he adds, “that something good might come of it in the near future.”

It’s a start, and the timing is right. He is already half a life ahead of Wray Downes.

By Leonard Feather, 1981

“It Could Happen to You” Lorne Lofsky. Pablo Today 2312-122. This 26 year-old Canadian guitarist was discovered by Oscar Peterson, who produced the album in Toronto. That Lofsky at his age hews to the tradition of unspoiled jazz guitar, without pedals or other extraneous devices, is remarkable in itself. That he chooses to play Bill Evans’ “Blue in Green”, John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments” is hardly les noteworthy.

Lofsky seduces with quiet good taste and harmonic beauty. The backing by Kieran Overs on bass and Joe Bendzsa on drums is low-key and adequate. Four stars.