1986's Dawn 'til Dusk is a departure for keyboardist Eddie Hardin, best known for being
Steve Winwood's replacement in
the Spencer Davis Group after the skinny one had decamped to form
Traffic, and for the somewhat anonymous blues-rock duo
Hardin & York. Dawn 'til Dusk is a solo piano record along the lines of
Liz Story's meditative, jazz- and classical-influenced work for the Windham Hill and Novus labels around the same time. The ten tracks are program music, each named and written to evoke a specific time of a single day, but the results are nowhere near as pretentious and twee as that sounds. The pieces are quite concise, all but one of them lasting under five minutes, with enough melodic heft to them to keep from simply floating off into the atmosphere. As with many solo piano albums, the uniformity of tone and style keeps individual tracks from really standing out, but Dawn 'til Dusk is more artistically successful than many of the extremely similar albums that were flooding the market in the mid-'80s. ~ Stewart Mason