During the late sixties and early seventies, JATP fell into a more-or-less yearly pattern of playing the Montreux Jazz Festival. (Today it seems more dedicated to pop music than to Jazz). Norman Granz would put together a group of musicians of his choice to appear at the Festival each summer. There was a resultant raft of wonderful recordings containing what I consider to be some of the most outstanding efforts of people such as Roy Eldridge, Eddie "Lockjaw” Davis", Joe Pass, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and many others. I have not recently played many of these recordings, due to a somewhat busy schedule (the OP CD-ROM, and the Note for Note book, along with the recent Trail of Dreams Suite). But recently I received a letter from a fan in England who happens to be a player himself, who was inquiring about a performance of mine that he heard live, during which I played a rendition of the Streisand classic, People. He commented that most of the recorded performances he had heard were uptempo, and he reminisced about the tempo at which I had performed it with my trio, which apparently stuck in his memory. He went on to ask whether or not there was a recorded version by me of this tune.

After consulting my record collection, my secretary Marion Meyer came up with the only version that she could find, which happened to be on a recording made at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The performance that she dug up, however, was not by my usual trio, but by a somewhat unusual group – yours truly, along with two of the world's greatest bass players, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and Ray Brown. This brought back to my memory the circumstances under which this album came to be, and I would like to recall them for you here. For as I realized now, the album actually grew out of an afternoon of comical threats between the two bassists and myself.

Niels, Ray and yours truly had spent the afternoon walking around Montreux, generally kibbitzing. Ray started teasing me in a jocular fashion about how easy bassists made it for me to play. One word led to another in this banter, and he was joined by Niels, who always enjoys this kind of offhand kidding. As we walked back to the hotel, we ran into Norman Granz, and the teasing, which had now progressed to mock threats, continued in his presence. Ray threatened to "stomp me into the ground," musically speaking, and Niels, of course, sided with him, being the type of instigator that he is. Norman immediately tuned into this mode of dialogue, aiding and abetting it by playing the part of the curious and befuddled bystander. "Are these guys really serious, OP?" he asked. "They sound as if they are really looking for you!" said he in his best quizzical and falsely innocent voice. We continued this repartee for some time, and then Norman, seizing on the exact moment, locked it off by saying something such as, "If you gentlemen are really serious about inflicting these kinds of lumps on OP, why don't we try it for real on stage?" He immediately followed this by dreaming up a part of the forthcoming evening performance which would contain a battle between the two bassists and myself. It was on this musical basis that we decided to include the song People as part of the performance. I treated it as a "walking" type rendition, giving Brown the chance to show off his forte as the great timekeeper that he is. The rest of the performances on the album I will leave to the listener's own personal evaluation. I must say here and now that this was one of the most enjoyable 'wars' of this kind that I had the musical pleasure of being involved in. I even got into the bass dialogue by answering some of the exchanges on the bass end of the piano with my left hand only. This was done to keep a lot of my retorts more pointedly in the dialogue of these two instigating bass players. This is the beauty of the Jazz element in its entirety, with its challenges, moments of musical elegance and - bruises.