Out Now: Bebopping Along by Phil Lentz, Opening the Second of Three CDs in Four Years
Out Now: Bebopping Along by Phil Lentz, Opening the Second of Three CDs in Four Years
The Jazz-Pop Opener of Phil Lentz’s Second CD, and the Road to Bounce
Bebopping Along by Phil Lentz came out on 21 November 2024, a jazz-pop instrumental that opens his second CD, Phil Lentz Presents… Vol. II. It is for listeners who like their jazz with a pop hook. It also sits in the middle of a fast run: three CDs in four years from a New York keyboard player who came to recording after a career in print and politics.
Phil Lentz has Bebopping Along in the playlist below, and his full run of coverage is on the Phil Lentz profile. The tune came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Give it a listen, then read on for the three CDs around it.
Philip Lentz wrote the tune, and Richard Philbin is the featured player, on saxophone. It runs two minutes and 24 seconds, and it is the first of the album’s 11 tracks.
Before Bebopping Along, Phil Lentz Released His First CD in 2022 After Careers in Print and Politics
The music came after a long first career. Lentz was a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Newark Star-Ledger and Crain’s New York Business. He was press secretary on Paul Tsongas’s 1992 presidential campaign, and later director of speechwriting for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
There are two novels as well, The Corcoran Affair in 2004 and Murder at City Hall in 2013. Meanwhile, he kept playing. His own site lists keyboard work in bands and workshops at The Bitter End, The Iridium, The Cutting Room, Shrine and Silvana’s, all in New York. Two of those rooms carry real history. The Bitter End has run in Greenwich Village since 1961, and The Iridium hosted Les Paul’s Monday-night residency for years.
The recordings started in September 2022 with Phil Lentz Presents…, an 11-track CD of original songs, from Bluesy and Tap Your Toes to Schumann’s Theme and a 69-second Lullaby. Lentz grew up in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and now lives in New York City. His website also carries his photography, from political pictures to New York streetscapes, so the music is one strand of a wider creative life.
Bebopping Along Opened Phil Lentz’s Second CD, and Bounce Followed With a Band in 2026
Phil Lentz Presents… Vol. II arrived in November 2024 with 11 more originals. Lentz describes it as jazz, pop and folk, and the titles show the range: The Circus, Honky-Tonk Blues, Blues a la Carte and Prairie March sit on the same disc. Bandcamp files the record under jazz, classical, folk and pop, and One Little Drop of Justice sits beside Chimes and Play Your Melody. Bebopping Along goes first, so it sets the terms for everything after it.
Lentz plays piano at the centre of a seven-piece cast. Dennis Harte plays guitar and produced the record, Richard Philbin and Red Heller play saxophone, Wolfgang Lugomarsini is on bass, Dave Young is on drums and Bob Cohen adds violin. Kostadin Kamcev recorded and mixed it at Studio Mozart.
That jazz-pop meeting has a long New York history. Billy Joel named his 1978 album 52nd Street after the Manhattan street of jazz clubs, and on it Freddie Hubbard played trumpet on Zanzibar. A year earlier, Steely Dan brought Wayne Shorter in for the tenor saxophone solo on the title track of Aja. Those were pop records reaching toward jazz. Bebopping Along comes from the other side, a jazz tune built to sit easily on a pop playlist.
What Came Next After Bebopping Along
The third CD came faster than the second. Bounce followed in April 2026, 17 months after Vol. II, where the gap before had been 26 months. It holds ten originals that Lentz describes as jazz, rock and folk, recorded with a backup band, and it reached Spotify on 16 October 2026. One thread runs through the run: Gospel, a tune from the 2022 CD, returns on Bounce in a five-minute version.
The arc runs from a first set of originals in 2022, through a wider mix of styles in 2024, to a CD made with a backup band in 2026. The band plays live as well. It was on stage at The Bitter End on 25 October 2024, a month before Vol. II came out, and videos from a more recent show there are on YouTube.
Start with Bebopping Along, then play Vol. II through to hear how far one disc travels. After that, put on Bounce for the band version of the same writer.
MusicDrops.News’s curator team: “Bebopping Along does what a good opener should. It is short, it is friendly, and it lets a newcomer into a jazz record without asking for any homework first.”
Follow Phil Lentz on Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, and find Vol. II on Bandcamp and the catalogue on Apple Music.
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