They really couldn’t have found a better title for their first joint album. With their “Kaleidoscope,” Michel Haumont and Joël Gombert create scintillating and colorful facets of their music and conjure musical images that you will never tire of.

The light French touch – nonchalant and elegant – of these two fingerstyle guitarists place them in the tradition of Marcel Dadi. They carry on an intimate dialogue of ballads, waltzes, jigs and ragtime pieces from their own pen, a dialogue whose complexity and compositional maturity is evidenced, above all, by the plain fact that it sounds unbelievably light.

In Joël Gombert, Michel Haumont found a soulmate who speaks his language, who is tuned into, and harmonizes perfectly with, every detail in the voice leading, the bass line, the harmony and every melody.

His fans can expect to be thrilled! Anyone who assumed that Claus Boesser-Ferrari had reached the end of the line with his recordings so far, and that he had tried out all musical and improvisational possibilities, will now have to stand corrected thanks to In Praise of Shadows. 

Using note cascades and virtuosic acoustic collages over and over again, Boesser-Ferrari creates poetic soundscapes and lets the music expand in time and space. He builds an almost seamless musical bridge between the modern jazz of a Charles Mingus and the psychedelic rock of Pink Floyd's guitarist Syd Barrett, adding his own compositions and adaptations of Lennon/McCartney, or even melodies by Martin Boettcher, composer for the Winnetou series. Pieces that are apparently diagonal opposites suddenly connect to form a harmonious whole and become unified in a poetic sound collage. One could say that Claus Boesser-Ferrari has explored galaxies that no human has ever heard before. Fasten your seatbelts!

Not available at present.

Paul’s new album “A Little Thunder” is his first release of new songs for a few years. Fourteen songs of life, love, death and alcohol, and the ‘bits in-between’...

As well as Paul’s voice and piano, there are outstanding contributions from his long time musicians, Butch Coulter on harmonica and guitar, Ingo Rau on bass and accordion and Vladi Kempf on drums. Also along for the ride are Nick Pentelow on saxophones, Uwe Metzler on guitar, son Andreas Millns on Hammond organ, and Gudrun Walther from the Irish folk band Cara on violin.

 „The Antonella Letters“ is an intimate and sensitive album by jazz and fusion guitarist Michael Sagmeister.  It's jazz guitar in its purest form, a concentrate of the harmonic and melodic lines all recorded by Sagmeister himself.  The eighteen cuts include twelve by Sagmeister himself, plus works by Chick Corea, John Coltrane, Carlos Jobim, Sonny Rollins, Johnny Green and Arthur Schwartz. Together they create a coherent whole filled with exciting harmonies as the basis for clever and motley melodies and improvisations. 

Michael Sagmeister just won the Hesse Jazz Prize 2019. He has over forty years of stage experience, and is a professor at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. His portfolio includes thirty CD productions, but Michael Sagmeister is not resting on his laurels. “The Antonella Letters”, coming just a year after the outstanding recording of “The Power Of Resistance”, is yet another milestone in his musical career and offers jazz at the highest level. 

The latest work of the renowned jazz duo Florian Poser & Martin Flindt - here extended to a quartet!

In his album, “Rio Rhythms”, Ahmed El-Salamouny, the specialist for Brazilian guitar music, lets listeners experience the magic of Brazil. The seventeen pieces on the CD are an exciting mixture of Brazilian rhythms delivered in a manner that is at times poetic and dreamy and at times highly virtuosic.

For the past ten years, Ahmed El-Salamouny has made Rio de Janeiro his second home. With his confident style and lots of expressiveness, he has created an essence of his experiences in this fascinating city, which he cloaks in an inimitable musical language. The album alternates own compositions with arrangements of known composers, like Tom Jobim, Baden Powell, Luis Bonfá, and Noel Rosa. Ahmed plays with all the accuracy of a classically trained guitar player and with all the passion of the south. One newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, summed it up in two words: “virtuosic magic”. 

By the way: this CD is also available as Vinyle-LP - with two, exclusive Bonus Tracks!
Collector's quality, 180g Vinyle. Please choose "Format: LP" instead of CD above.

The late 1950s/early 60s were the golden era of organ trios, when virtuosos such as Jimmy Smith or Larry Young and earthy, blues-based Hammond masters such as Brother Jack McDuff or Big John Patton recorded legendary albums and rocked smoky clubs with guitarists such as Kenny Burrell or Grant Green.

The Gregor Hilden Organ Trio celebrates those times on their vintage instruments – on the present album with original compositions in the old style such as the title song “Vintage Wax”, as well as a classic of the genre, Jimmy McGriff’s “All About My Girl”. But the trio of the guitarist from Münster/Germany goes far beyond that and broadens the stylistic range with Soul Power, Funk Grooves, Mellow Moods and – just like they did on their “First Take” album – with a surprising instrumental version of a hit melody. Gregor Hilden once again underpins his renown as an extremely versatile guitarist with deep blues roots who makes every note count instead of wasting too many. He has by now become an institution on his instrument with an immediately identifiable own style – which is also appreciated by almost 90,000 followers and millions of listeners on his YouTube Channel.

As before, the outstanding organist (and on two tracks singer) Wolfgang Roggenkamp is equally featured with his fluid solos, rhythmic chording and bass pedal work – perfect command of the Hammond vocabulary paired with creative inspiration. Hilden and Roggenkamp have also penned over half of the songs on this album together.

Groovemeister Dirk Brand is also on board again, providing rock-solid beats and tasty breaks. 
(Klaus Kilian)

Guitarist and singer-songwriter Sophie Chassée displays impressive modern fingerstyle technique and has a voice that gets under your skin. She has been attracting attention in the scene for some time now. It was high time she released her latest album with Acoustic Music.

Sophie Chassée's percussive yet melodic guitar performance has a forcible and stirring clarity and virtuosity. The tapestry of delicately and richly nuanced sounds she weaves on her Lakewood serve as a backdrop upon which her beautiful and extraordinary voice unfolds at times with power and intensity, and at other times gently and vulnerably. There’s no kitsch or pathos here, but rather melancholy and always great depth. Sophie Chassée paints verbal pictures in her English-language songs and tells tales of friendship and love, transformation and farewells. The cherry on top are the discreet basslines, percussion, vocals and sensitive pad and electric guitar lines, which she recorded herself. Lesson learned – and how!

The album is a tribute to the great masters of Russian guitar music. And Evgeni Finkelstein is surely the one who can best present their work. Some of these compositions haven’t been performed for more than a hundred years and can be heard for the first time on a CD.

The Moscow master guitarist applies the greatest musical sensitivity and masterful virtuosity to these interpretations of works by Nikolai Makarov (1810-1890), Nikolai Alexandrov (1818-1884) and Vladimir Morkov (1801-1864), among others. He also performs compositions by twentieth-century composers, like Sergei Rudnev (*1955), Nikita Koshkin (*1956), Julia Finkelstein (*1977) and Evgeni Finkelstein (*1972) himself. Their place on this album and make it into a comprehensive compilation of Russian music written for the classical guitar that is well worth listening to.

Anyone who has experienced or heard Evgeni Finkelstein's unique art of interpreting classical music – whether live or on CD – and his almost unequaled playing skills knows what a musical treat awaits with each new recording from this artist on six strings, who has won prize after prize.

These are wonderful melodies, dreamy, even a bit pensive and always a touch melancholic.

Jacques Stotzem’s “Handmade” presents euphoniously sophisticated fingerstyle inspired from blues and jazz. Stotzem scored outstanding successes with his arrangements of rock classics by the Stones, Nirvana, U2, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, as well as a highly-acclaimed homage to the Irish blues-rock guitarist Rory Gallagher. Now, the Belgian master guitarist is once again forging his own musical path and impressively girding his reputation as an imaginative composer and one of the most soulful and accomplished fingerstyle guitarists of our time. He has done so with great musical clarity and with a recording quality that other guitarists would probably envy.

This is an album that will provide pleasure and let you daydream to the last harmony and note.