Excerpted from the October 7, 2010 interview by Portland Press Herald reviewer Steve Feeney:

I know you've worked with most of your band members on this disc for many years. Does the familiarity make it easier to work together?

I wanted to record with musicians I play gigs with the most. Everyone in one way or another is either from Maine or lives here. They are very patient with me, and I give them a lot of room to play they play the way I would if I played those instruments. So I don't need to say much to them except a few things about the chart -- this goes here, play back to the sign, etc.

In a recent review of the Steve Grover Quintet featured on Between Now And After, Steve Feeney wrote, “The brass/reeds frontline gave the combo a varied voice, alternating unison lines with dialogues and musical squabbles…Like the finest of drummer/bandleaders, [Grover’s] presence is felt at every moment of the music, providing a rhythmic environment of power and feeling.”

In a new review from Up Beat magazine, Steve Feeney writes, "This music is where their hearts are...The Garden Above is an album of real depth...[an] adventurous release by three veteran musicians who have reached a new level of individual and collective freedom."

—Up Beat, 10/06

The Wire's Alan Chase writes,
“The Garden Above” on Invisible Music Records is a fine example of interactive jazz from the trio of saxophonist David Wells, guitarist Tony Gaboury and drummer Steve Grover. With no bass, there is a nice open sound and sense of freedom, not unlike that of drummer Paul Motian’s trio of the same instrumentation. All three musicians have a strong sense of time, yet don’t allow themselves to get too locked in. You’ll hear this on cuts like the opening original “Rise and Shine,” the version of Charlie Parker’s “Big Foot” and the beautifully rendered version of Cole Porter’s “Do I Love You,” which features Wells’ warm sound and imaginative ideas interacting with Gaboury’s colorfully melodic counterlines. It’s been years since I’ve heard Gaboury in any context, and his playing throughout this disc is superb. So, too, is the drumming of Grover, who displays his usual fine sense of time and color."

“Familiarity breeds, in the context, at least, of this exquisite trio, a breadth of intuitive communication that flows, seemlessly, from composer-drummer Grover’s pen and h(ear)t, and is, somehow, at the ineffable juncture of miracle and art, enlarged upon and amplified by his collaborators, Chris Van Voorst Van Beest on contrabass and the vivid sympatico of Frank Carlberg’s piano…The commerce between them is easy/intense; swinging and probing and joyous…and oh! How it flows, so seem-lessly, from Grover’s pen and h(ear)t all the way over to our ears…h(ear)ts.”

– Paul Lichter
Producer, Dimensions In Jazz concert series