Sounding like a combination of Dave Frishberg and Michael Franks (with traces of Bob Dorough and Mose Allison), Don Glaser provided an unusually humorous and lighthearted approach to jazz singing on Slices of Life. Humor was hard to find in the dead-serious jazz climate of the 1990s; combine that with the fact that Glaser is a male jazz singer, which had become an endangered species, and you've got a CD that was unorthodox by late-1990s standards. This laidback, relaxed effort demonstrated that while Glaser doesn't have a huge voice or a tremendous range, he can be a witty storyteller. The singer/pianist is especially clever on "Teaneck, NJ" (an ode to the East Coast town that gave us the Isley Brothers) and the quirky "Strawberry Jam," and he's even touching on "Will I Ever Grow Up," which deals with facing the challenges of adulthood when you're still a kid at heart. The most annoying songs on Slices are "I Do Lunch" and "Shopping," both of which feature singer Carol Glaser (Glaser's wife and the CD's co-producer). The tunes find Carol portraying herself as a "material girl" whose only concerns are chi-chi restaurants, credit cards and shopping sprees, but one gets the impression that the Glasers are poking fun at such empty-headed, shallow materialism rather than celebrating it. If so, you have to admire them for ridiculing that which deserves to be ridiculed, even if the songs do get on your nerves in a major way. But thankfully, the disc's strengths outweigh its weaknesses. Slices of Life indicated that if you enjoyed Frishberg, Dorough and Franks, Glaser was also someone to be aware of.