Blues, ballads, bossas, burners—it made no difference to the late Joe Pass, an uncompromising perfectionist who took them all in stride and was, if anything, almost too flawless to arouse in the listener an earnest emotional response. Listening to Pass, one quickly gains the impression that there wasn't anything he couldn't do—an impression that is borne out by his uncanny ability to weave deceptively candid single-note lines into a remarkably poetic tapestry while swinging prodigiously in any context.

These radiant sessions with Germany's spit-polished NDR Big Band, the most recent of which was recorded in February 1992, a little more than two years before the guitarist's death at age 65, show that age did not wither nor custom stale Pass's extraordinary talents. The '92 date, which encompasses half a dozen of the disc's 15 selections, is given a symphonic veneer by the Radio Philharmonie of Hannover whose lustrous strings complement and amplify NDR's brass, winds and rhythm. Pass wrote five of the tunes—a (Sweet) Bossa, (Fragments of) a Blues (with its deft allusions to "Old Man River"), a brace of ballads ("For Nina," "I'll Know") and a "Waltz (for Django)."

The rest are standards except for