While most self-produced CDs these days seem to be either rock or techno-oriented music, Nick Kepics has taken a decidedly unique turn with his self-produced CD, titled Piece Offering. For most of the album, Kepics plays a hollowbodied Ibanez jazz guitar, with a warm, clean, full tone, very much in keeping with the CD's combination of West Coast cool jazz and bossa nova-style grooves. He chose to make a self-produced CD to explore his jazz and compositional skills, which he rarely gets to indulge as a working musician earning his pay gigging at weddings, anniversaries and parties.

An interesting variation to the cool jazz theme is "Lac Fantome", with a first half that's reminiscent of some of Miles Davis and Gil Evans' tone poems on Sketches of Spain, before resolving itself into a traditionally breezy riffing. Kepics, on the liner notes, says it was inspired by a desert mirage outside of Edwards Air Force Base.

Another variation from the theme is "Walt's Blues", which attempts to combine traditional jazz with high-tech synthesizer sounds, such a trumpet through a very guitar-sounding envelope filter, followed by a trumpet through a synthesizer, which reduces the horn player to sounding like a keyboardist trying to ape a horn section. Kepics then blasts in John McLaughlin-style on the only distorted sounding solo he plays on the album. While the solo is interesting, it doesn't redeem the failed experimenting on the rest of the track. Maybe it looks cool in front of an audience, but it left me more than a little initially confused as to was playing what-and more importantly, why.

With the exception of "Walt's Blues", however, the rest of the album works very well. Like a good jazz album from the 1950s, it makes for nice background music, but rewards active listening. Kepics, while a first rate jazz guitarist, and the leader of the band, wisely goes for an ensemble feeling, giving equal weight to the other musicans in the group, rather than making a jazz equivalent of self-indulgent guitar hero masturbation.

Two of the tracks are available to preview at the artist's home page, along with an artist's biography and photos.