"Pianist Michael Jefry Stevens sounds equally at home playing inside or out, and thrives on co-operative ventures where musicians converse freely". - The Ottawa Citizen The FONDA/STEVENS GROUP "Evolution" (Leo Records) "If you are interested in the future of jazz, this disk is for you: it comes from one of the rare groups of today that are capable to announce it." - Jazz Magazine/Paris MICHAEL JEFRY STEVENS/MARK FELDMAN "Haiku" (Leo Records) "If Bela Bartok and Josef Szigeti had ever sat down to make an album of improvisations, it would have sounded a lot like these nocturnal meditations". - Cadence Magazine MICHAEL JEFRY STEVENS/DOMINIC DUVAL QUINTET "Elements" (Leo Records) "The Cecil Taylor influence is evident from the first cut, where Stevens creates barking sounds by scratching the strings from inside the piano. Obviously, he's a truly outside character..... Stevens turns the air into whirlwinds and the water into tidal waves. It's turbulent Jazz that you might want to weather out." - Jazz Now Magazine JOE FONDA/MICHAEL JEFRY STEVENS "The Wish" (Music and Arts) "This is a fine band that already has a distinctive character, compounded of rare cohesion and an ability to think in multiple ways at the same time, with sudden shifts and confluences in direction". - Cadence Magazine FONDA/STEVENS GROUP (live concert review from Ottawa International Jazz Festival) "..one of the most exciting quintets of the late 90's....What is most striking about the quintet is the balance it achieves between aggressive, sometimes abrasive, playing and languid passages of deep contemplation". - Ottawa Citizen STEVENS, SIEGEL & FERGUSON "Points of View" (Imaginary Jazz) "Not easy to create one unit of three minds and personalities. Hard to forget ego and just listen, respond, work together in service to the music...... Their tight ensemble sound makes their second CD for the Imaginary Label a fine, swinging affair-happy, interesting and propulsive." - Jazz Times Magazine DAKOTA STATON GROUP (live concert review from Harrisburg, PA) "The show's icing on the cake was Michael Jefry Stevens, the pianist with the trio.....Stevens is a monster player, meaning that nothing stumps him and he is a composite of styles. He's busy, powerful, has a great left hand, plays brilliant stride piano, concocts elaborate keyboard runs and invents the darndest combinations of dissonant chords that resolve just in the nick of time". - Harrisburg Sunday Patriot News STEVENS, SIEGEL & FERGUSON "One of a Kind" (Imaginary Jazz) "The trio, whose members are all equally outstanding, covers the gamut of musical styles from Evans to "soulful" latin grooves with a three dimensional and imaginative performance that never goes flat.....These musicians take any raw material and cook it up impressively in their own style, and their original works are equally splendid". - Jazz Life Magazine, Japan MICHAELJEFRY STEVENS/MARK FELDMAN "Haiku" (Leo Records) "You have to one after one taste these everlasting beauties, these renewed timbre miracles, this knowledge of cantabile. To know that this session...is entirely improvised.....all this is intimidating and shows the level of exigency and complicity that these two musicians have achieved. Sovereign masters of the illusion to such an extent that they let us believe in the music being there without them, Stevens and Feldman accomplish here the quiet "tour de fource" which is the very injunction of art". - Improjazz (France) STEVENS/DUVAL QUINTET "Elements" (Leo Records) "For all of you who remember or don't yet know how collective improvisation also is bound to the subtlety of some elastic approaches along a line which could include Lenny Tristano, Jimmy Giuffre, Marion Brown, Noah Howard, Anthony Davis....'Elements' is dryly, wetly, coldly, warmly recommended". - Improjazz (France) STEVENS, SIEGEL & FERGUSON "One of a Kind" (Imaginary Jazz) "Stevens' vigorously spirited opening solo after the introduction speaks for itself by indulging the listener in a scintillating conversation between the piano, bass and drums.....On Stevens' blues influenced "The Moffett Family", the trio is at the peak of its power with the pianist in the lead chair on one of the funkiest solos in the set". - Atlanta Audio Society Journal The FONDA/STEVENS GROUP "Evolution" (Leo Records) "...Strayhorn, written for Billy of the same name, and just about as sublime as the Lotus in bloom. The voicings for the two horns reminds me of the way Charles Mingus could bruise the harmonies blue just enough to make them weep a little". - Avant Magazine, England