Phil Lentz and Richard Philbin Cut Bebopping Along at Studio Mozart in New Jersey
The Self-Released Opener of an American Pianist’s Second CD of Jazz, Pop and Folk Songs
Bebopping Along opens Phil Lentz Presents… Vol. II, an 11-track CD that runs to just over 29 minutes. Phil Lentz self-released the jazz album in November 2024. The opening cut lasts two minutes and 24 seconds, with Richard Philbin as the featured player on saxophone.
Phil Lentz’s Bebopping Along now sits in our instrumental and nu-jazz playlist, and the full run of coverage is on Phil Lentz’s artist profile. The single reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Give it a listen, then read on for how the record was put together.
Phil Lentz Rotates the Guests on Vol. II, and Bebopping Along Gives the First Turn to the Saxophone
Phil Lentz is a pianist and composer based in New York City, United States. On Vol. II, the piano stays at the centre and the guests change. Each of the 11 tracks pairs Lentz with one or two featured names.
Philbin takes three of those spots, on the first track, the fifth and the last. So the saxophone opens the album and closes it. Philbin has no albums or singles under that name on Spotify, so these three tracks are where to hear that saxophone. Red Heller is on five tracks, while Bob Cohen, on violin, and Dennis Harte have three each.
On Bebopping Along, the saxophone takes the featured part, and Lentz plays piano. Phil Lentz, whose full name is Philip Lentz, wrote it. The title nods to bebop, the small-group style of the 1940s, and the cut keeps a loose, late-night feel.
Short is the house style. Nine of the 11 tracks finish inside three minutes, and only two run past four. Even the two longer tracks stop well short of five minutes. The last track is the shortest of all, at one minute and 45 seconds.
Changing the line-up within one album has a long history in jazz. Thelonious Monk recorded Brilliant Corners across three sessions in October and December 1956, with two different quintets. It came out on Riverside in 1957, as the label’s first Monk album to include original compositions. Monk also switched to celesta on Pannonica, so the colour changed inside the record as well as the line-up. Bebopping Along starts the same kind of rotation at a smaller scale, with one composer at the piano and the guests taking turns.
Both Copyright Lines on Bebopping Along Carry Phil Lentz’s Name, and the Studio Returns for Bounce
The producer came from inside the band. Harte, who plays guitar on the album, produced it. Then Kostadin Kamcev recorded and mixed it at Studio Mozart in Little Falls, New Jersey.
The business side stayed in-house as well. Both copyright lines on the album, for the release and for the recording, name Phil Lentz. Meanwhile, the album sits on the artist’s own Bandcamp page, next to the rest of the catalogue.
The same room turns up again on the next album. A video for Seven Rivers, from the 2026 album Bounce, includes footage from a recording session at Studio Mozart.
The setting also has history. Sonny Rollins recorded Saxophone Colossus on 22 June 1956 at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, with Bob Weinstock producing. Rollins led a quartet with the pianist Tommy Flanagan, the bassist Doug Watkins and the drummer Max Roach, and Prestige released the album to strong reviews. Bebopping Along works at a far smaller scale, but the outline is familiar: a saxophone with a piano, a producer and an engineer, and a New Jersey room.
Bebopping Along Is on Spotify and Bandcamp, While Phil Lentz Takes the Band to The Bitter End
The single plays on this page and is also on Apple Music, while the full album is on Spotify and Bandcamp. On Bandcamp, Lentz files Vol. II under jazz, classical, folk and pop.
On stage, the songs belong to a band. Lentz’s band played The Bitter End in Greenwich Village on 1 May 2026, with Play Your Melody from Vol. II as the encore. The set also included I Remember the Early Days, the ballad that follows Bebopping Along on the album. The band was back on 16 October, and six songs from that night are now on the YouTube channel.
One of them, One Little Drop of Justice, also comes from Vol. II. It is a folk song about John Henry James, who was lynched in Virginia in 1898 and exonerated many years later. As a result, the record that opens with a bebop tune also carries a civil-rights story.
Bebopping Along suits listeners who like short, tuneful jazz with a pop sense of time, and fans of saxophone and piano records from the 1950s onwards. It also suits curators in the United States who build playlists of independent jazz.
IndieMusic.News’s curator team: “Every tune on Vol. II is an original, which gives the rotating guests fresh material instead of standards. Bebopping Along is a tidy first example. It makes its point and hands over to the next guest.”
Start with the player on this page. After that, play Vol. II from the top, in the order Phil Lentz set it.
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