Marc Cary has spent close to a decade honing a distinctive sound and improvisational approach with his enduring and much acclaimed Focus Trio. Four Directions, the band's first studio recording in eight years, follows on the heels of two powerful interim releases (Focus Trio Live 2008 and Focus Trio Live 2009). Despite a few shifts in the bass chair, and an ever-transforming array of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, the band's original mission, as Cary stated in his liner notes for Focus, the band's 2006 debut, remains the same: "to bring indigenous rhythms together with American jazz to create new palettes of sound."

Born in New York in January 1967, Cary grew up in DC and went on to become an important figure in the city's burgeoning go-go scene. He attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, and upon relocating to New York in 1988, began his rise as a jazz piano modernist. In 1994 he began a life-changing 12-year tenure with vocalist, songwriter and jazz icon Abbey Lincoln.

In addition to Lincoln, Cary has worked with such masters as Arthur Taylor, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Shirley Horn. His talent has elevated the music of everyone from Russell Gunn and Marcus Printup to Q-Tip, Meshell Ndegeocello and Ani DiFranco and as a recording artist his ensemble work has helped earn GRAMMY® Award-nominations for albums by Abbey Lincoln, Betty Carter, Roy Hargrove and Stefon Harris.