thomastik-infeld

Kurt Rosenwinkelā€™s new album is a trip nearly 30 years into the past, to a time when he and his collaborators found lightning in a bottle in a renowned New York club.

Photo by Aleks Končar

The influential jazz guitaristā€™s new release, The Next Step Band (Live at Smalls, 1996), captures a performance at NYCā€™s Smalls at a time when the venue was emerging as a local creative hotbed. Heā€™s also publishing a career-spanning book of compositions, and together, the works demonstrate a jazz-guitar genius in search of musical and existential truth.

Kurt Rosenwinkelā€™s 2000 Verve release, The Next Step, changed the jazz-guitar world. Up until that point, the big names of the ā€™60s and ā€™70s still dominated the landscape. The Next Step signified a new voice, and soon, a number of younger players began to try to emulate Kurtā€™s sound, approach, and even the way he dressed.

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Thomastik-Infeld and Connolly Music introduce the Infeld Bronze acoustic guitar set, featuring long-lasting phosphor bronze strings with exceptional balance and clarity.

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"I donā€™t like any type of art that has to be explained."

Photo by Scott Friedlander

The profoundly prolific guitarist leads his band of tricksters through a surrealist sonic exploration of deep, esoteric rhythms and intricate interplay on Thisness.

On his new album Thisness, Miles Okazaki is credited as playing guitar, voice, and robots. If you imagine that the reference to robots is some sort of artsy kitschā€”like trapping a Roomba Robot Vacuum into a tight space to sample its struggles as it percussively barrels into the four wallsā€”youā€™re very far off the mark. Okazakiā€”who has an elite academic pedigree with degrees from Harvard, Manhattan School of Music, and Julliard, and currently holds a faculty position at Princeton University (after leaving a post at the University of Michigan, to which he commuted weekly from his home in Brooklyn for eight years)ā€”wasnā€™t kidding.

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