Phil Lentz Presents… Vol. II Arrived in Election Month, From a Star-Ledger Newsman Turned Jazz Pianist
Eleven Pieces in Twenty-Nine Minutes From a Writer Whose Photographs Run From Daley to Dukakis
At Studio Mozart in Little Falls, New Jersey, engineer Kostadin Kamcev recorded and mixed the eleven pieces that became Phil Lentz Presents… Vol. II. Phil Lentz played the keyboards, and producer Dennis Harte added guitar and banjo. The album of original jazz, pop and folk songs came out in November 2024, the month of a presidential election. That timing says a good deal about the man who made it.
Phil Lentz’s music sits in the playlist below, and the Phil Lentz artist profile gathers the coverage so far. Phil Lentz Presents… Vol. II reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Press play on the album, then read on.
Before the music, there was the news. Lentz worked as a journalist at the Newark Star-Ledger, where Bob Herbert was a colleague. His own photographs from those years still read like a political calendar. They run from Mayor Richard J. Daley celebrating his 1971 re-election to the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta. Others show Michael Dukakis boarding a plane during his 1988 run and the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York.
The fiction, meanwhile, kept the same company. Lentz wrote two political novels, The Corcoran Affair and Murder at City Hall. Both follow a tabloid reporter called Scuzzy Schwartz as he chases a president and then a mayor through scandal. Then, after the 2024 vote, Lentz was back on screen. He joined Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed.TV on CUNY TV as a guest to talk through what the result meant.
So the album arrived from someone with a lifetime of headlines behind him.
Phil Lentz Presents… Vol. II Packs Eleven Original Pieces Into Twenty-Nine Minutes of Jazz, Pop and Folk
Lentz composed all eleven songs and arranged them with Harte, who produced the record. The band around his keyboards is a small one. Wolfgang Lagomarsini plays bass and Dave Young drums. Richard Philbin and Sharon “Red” Heller add two saxophones, and Bob Cohen brings the violin. Afterwards, Tom Hutten of Bionic Mastering mastered it, and Kat Georges designed the sleeve.
Overall, the running order keeps everything brief. Bebopping Along opens the album at 2:24, The Circus lasts under two minutes, and Coda closes it in 1:45. Most of the rest also sit between two and three minutes. In fact, only two pieces pass four minutes. Play Your Melody runs 4:03, and One Little Drop of Justice runs 4:13, the longest on the record.
That shape gives the album a wry, late-night quality without ever asking for patience. A listener can take in the whole thing in less time than a television news hour. Meanwhile, the jazz, pop and folk strands sit side by side rather than in separate camps. On Spotify, Red Heller is also credited as a featured artist on I Remember the Early Days, the second track.
The record continues a series, too. The first volume, Phil Lentz Presents…, came out in September 2022 with eleven songs. The second matches it piece for piece.
After Decades Near Politics, Phil Lentz Answers With Pieces Called The Circus, Chimes and December Song
Read the track list as a reporter might, and the answer is clear. Of eleven titles, only one sounds like it could sit on a front page. It is also the longest piece on the album. Instead, everything else points at play, seasons and small pleasures: Honky-Tonk Blues, Blues a la Carte, Prairie March, Chimes.
Randy Newman showed how far a pianist can take a real event into song. His Louisiana 1927, from the 1974 album Good Old Boys, told the story of the Great Mississippi Flood. Lentz, who spent years close to real events, keeps that instinct to a single title here. One Little Drop of Justice is the title that reaches for something larger. The other ten leave the listener room to breathe.
There is also a New York thread. Lentz plays clubs such as the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. The city also has a long line of pianists writing songs about where they live. Billy Joel never released New York State of Mind as a single. Yet the 1976 song from Turnstiles became one of his most covered. Similarly, Vol. II is a record that finds its listeners over time, not on release day.
From the NewMusic.News Curator Team: “What stays with us is the discipline. A writer who spent years around elections and conventions made a record where most pieces end inside three minutes. Then he trusted the tunes to say enough.”
The series has kept moving since. Bounce, Lentz’s third CD of original jazz, folk and rock songs, arrived in April 2026. It has ten new pieces and Dave Mullen on saxophone.
Start with Bebopping Along for the album’s easy side, then go to the longest piece, the one with the weightiest title.
Buy the album on Bandcamp, then follow Phil Lentz on Spotify and Apple Music. Watch the YouTube channel, and keep up on Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok and Bluesky, with more on the official site.
