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Richard Kolb was first attracted to the music of Robert Ballard at the beginning of my career as a lute player many years ago. The elegance of emerging French Baroque style combined with late Renaissance sensibility and well-crafted counterpoint appealed to him, and having grown up partly in France gave him an affinity for the music's distinctively French character. In the course of a long career, Kolb lost track of Ballard's music for many years, but the attraction was strongly revived several years ago when he decided to recommit himself to lute playing after a period of concentrating on scholarship. Ballard's music comes across as having an easygoing charm and unaffected gracefulness. Kolb's work as a musicologist has given him a sense of his importance in the musical scene of 17th-century France, and it seems incongruous that while Ballard's contemporary Ennemond Gaultier has received considerable attention from modern-day lutenists, Ballard has been relatively ignored. Most of Gaultier's surviving music is available in good recordings, while almost none of Ballard's music has ever been recorded. Richard Kolb has chosen thirty of the fifty-five pieces in Ballard's Premier Livre, published in 1611. They consist of prelude-like Entrées de luth, arrangements of songs from Ballets de cour, and dances, featuring especially the newly fashionable courante. Ballard's volume leaves it up to the performer to select and group the pieces for performance. Kolb has made seven short suites that fit together according to their keys or moods.