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Keyboardist David Garfield was nineteen when he got his start playing alongside influential bebop jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. But opportunities came quickly for him in contemporary jazz as well as in R&B and pop, which guided the direction of his now five-decade career away from his roots. Straight-ahead jazz has remained in his core and he’s longed to return “home” thus to launch his prolific multi-volume, multi-genre “Outside the Box” collection, Garfield drops his first straight-ahead jazz album, Jazz Outside the Box. In addition to playing piano, Fender Rhodes and synthesizers, Garfield produced and arranged the 15-track jazz set that revisits Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, Joe Sample, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Oliver Nelson and Joe Zawinul classics, applies an imaginative jazz varnish to a pair of Sting songs, and presents four of his own compositions. To materialize his vision, Garfield rounded up a massive ensemble that boasts several accomplished musicians he’s never worked with before but have long been on his wish list of collaborators such as trumpeter Wallace Roney, percussionist Poncho Sanchez and drummer Steve Jordan. Randy Brecker, Michael McDonald, Tom Scott, Eric Marienthal, Pete Christlieb, Bennie Maupin, Brian Auger, Will Lee, Airto Moreira along with dozens of other prominent players guest on the record, which includes Charlie Bisharat’s String Quartet and an orchestra conducted by John Clayton. Jazz Outside the Box contains among the final performances by a pair of recently-departed guitar greats, Chuck Loeb and Larry Coryell. Perhaps the most unusual contribution comes from The Doors’ John Densmore, who plays drums and orates on a spoken word segment on the full-length version of Silver’s “Song For My Father.”