Classical guitar never reaches too far beyond its devoted niche audience — to the majority of classical-music listeners, the term brings to mind the dulcet murmuring of Andres Segovia and little else. Part of the problem is a lack of repertory warhorses — try as they might, classical guitarists cannot seem to rescue a "Beethoven of the guitar" from posterity, and their efforts to do so usually end up placing undue focus on pleasant non-entities. A shame, really, since the acoustic guitar is as full of thrilling sonic possibilities — for polyphony, for percussive textures, for delicate beauty — as any stringed instrument in the world.

The inventive and exciting guitarist/composer Andrew McKenna Lee solves both of these problems in one fell swoop. First of all, he is an astoundingly virtuosic guitar player. Second, and far more importantly, he is a thoughtful and original composer, one who is continually finding new ways to work the guitar's rougher, more sensual textures into classical frameworks. His colorful artist bio — "Imagine John Fahey, Jimi Hendrix and Domenico Scarlatti sitting down for a whiskey and a smoke" — might just sound like the usual empty artist's-bio name-dropping, but you can actually hear all these… read more »