As everything we see and hear is no more or less than a snapshot in time, it is easy to forget that many of our brightest jazz stars once shined their light on campuses and in classrooms from coast to coast while honing their budding skills. Pianist Jesus Fuentes is one such scholar, the album Liminality: Live at Smith 25 his doctoral degree recital, and Smith 25 the room in Smith Memorial Hall where it was recorded in November 2020 (the name of the school is not given). Ordinarily, the room would have been filled with students, teachers, family and friends, but the coronavirus pandemic made that impossible, so what we have is a socially distanced quartet playing to an empty room, recorded via Fuentes' portable recorder and single microphone.

Presumably, every member of the quartet is (or was) a fellow student. They are saxophonist Matthew Storie, bassist Andrew Binder and drummer Maxwell Osawa. The relatively concise thirty-five-minute recital consists of four songs, two by Fuentes and one each by