Guitar

When he's not turning somersaults, doing backward flips, and standing on his head – all while playing, of course – Guitar Shorty is prone to cutting loose with savagely slashing licks on his instrument. Live, he's simply amazing – and after some lean years, his latter-day albums for Black Top, Evidence, and Alligator have proven that all that energy translates vividly onto tape. Collection includes: I Go Wild! (2001); Watch Your Back (2004); We The People (2006); Bare Knuckle (2010).

Guitarist Anne Haasch sets the mood for a dialogue across centuries in her new Genuin recording with works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Manuel María Ponce. She combines the rarely recorded 24 Preludes by the Mexican composer with the Lute Suite No. 2 by the Leipzig Thomaskantor, whom he revered. However, the juxtaposition of these works is a dialogue not only across time but across continents as well. Like Bach, Ponce has mastered the art of creating dense, eternal spheres of tension, but within ostensibly inconspicuous forms and simple, poetic lines. Anne Haasch captures this immensely expressive music's architecture, rhetoric, and content with her clear and vibrant playing.

Guitarist Anne Haasch sets the mood for a dialogue across centuries in her new Genuin recording with works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Manuel María Ponce. She combines the rarely recorded 24 Preludes by the Mexican composer with the Lute Suite No. 2 by the Leipzig Thomaskantor, whom he revered. However, the juxtaposition of these works is a dialogue not only across time but across continents as well. Like Bach, Ponce has mastered the art of creating dense, eternal spheres of tension, but within ostensibly inconspicuous forms and simple, poetic lines. Anne Haasch captures this immensely expressive music's architecture, rhetoric, and content with her clear and vibrant playing.

Like football (soccer) and coffee, the guitar is inextricably linked with Brazil in the collective imagination. Yet despite its significance to the country’s musical identity, the major class divide in the colonial period saw the guitar dismissed as an instrument of the common, uneducated populace, in contrast to the piano, which represented the aspirations of the wealthier middle classes.