• Guitar Sapiens

    Guitar Sapiens

    The Peruvian guitarist Yuri Juárez sets scenes and drafts landscapes, with sounds put down, like paint, by his expert fingers. He is the guitarist for the Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet, for whom he calls up images and implies great distances, providing song after song, whether studio or live, with a visual field uncannily provoked by…

  • Melissa Aldana

    Melissa Aldana

    South Americans get the saxophone in a way that gets to me. It started with Gato Barbieri and Last Tango in Paris, his tenor paradoxically sharp and lush, a bite and a kiss. It stayed with me, like an inoculation against its own forgetting, since first I heard it. Then, a few years ago, when…

  • Gato Barbieri

    Gato Barbieri

    I was able, on Monday night, to watch Gato Barbieri play the saxophone from a few paces away. He is in his early 80s, but nothing in his music wears and in the breath that powers it nothing falters. It was, in fact, among the things that struck me the most that his sound, even…