On his new album Rebirth, Billy Childs reaches back to the start of his almost astoundingly varied musical experience-leading a small jazz band of state-of-the-art musicians with his piano playing. An accomplished symphonic writer, he has also amassed a career's worth of jazz originals that can swing hard, dazzle with intricacy, touch you with direct simplicity, or mesmerize with crystalline lyricism. He has the ability to equally distill the harmonic and rhythmic languages of classical music and jazz into his playing. "You're hearing something on this album that I love doing but that I haven't done a lot of lately: having musical conversations as a member of a group. That's what I love."