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Snow Owl (Juan Garcia-Herreros) Art of Contrabass Guitar
With his stateside debut of Art of Contrabass Guitar, Juan Garcia-Herreros has created an impressive opening to the ears of any potential 21st century music aficionado. I tend not to throw around the word “virtuoso” lightly, but Juan’s playing in every sense has in my opinion earned that status.
His gift to leap genres with a strong sense of authenticity, coupled with an extremely mature solo voice will in this listeners eyes (and ears) create a bit of a buzz from his contemporaries, and deservedly so. The gift of approaching improvisational mastery and equally displaying groove sensibility as well is a tough challenge, but his playing on each track seems to reinforce both of those attributes. His un-accompanied improvisational pieces are pure icing on the cake, showing this particular musicians commitment to owning a multi-faceted voice on his instrument. If that’s not enough, his compositional skills (being the composer for most of the tracks) are an equal match to his virtuosic efforts. Jazz, Latin, Funk, and the dreaded F word…fusion…are all encompassed within his compositional efforts, and none of it seems to fall into any type of stereotypical “traditional” vibe, again, a tough challenge these days, or any time for that matter.
His choice of musical participants for this effort reflects his ability to hear in an “overall” atmosphere. He brings in the right people, and they most certainly respond to help compliment all of the compositions…that accomplishment is an art in itself.
This is unequivocally a music for music’s sake effort by Juan, a welcome addition to the difficult but growing position of a bass player driven effort…one of the best debut CD’s I’ve heard in a while.
Visit online at www.the-snow-owl.com.
Jake Kot