Handmade : Emilio Solla's Tribute to Craft and it's Importance to Human Connection

 

Emilio Solla and La Inestable De Brooklyn-Handmade-Club Disco Records

The Grammy award winning, Argentina-born pianist/composer Emilio Solla and his group La Inestable De Brooklyn, releases his latest Handmade of March 13, 2026. Solla is this era’s eminent practitioner of creating modern music. He skillfully combines elements of Tango, Milonga, Latin Folk and Jazz sensibilities into its own beguiling style and Handmade delivers that in spades.

For those not up to speed on Solla’s previous work, Solla was educated in Argentina receiving his degree in Classical Piano at the National Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aires. He later received a master’s in jazz composition from the Aaron Copland School of Music in New York, eventually relocating first to Barcelona in Spain in 1996 and later to New York in 2006 where he now resides. He has worked with notable jazz musicians like Billy Hart, Paquito Rivera and Donny McCaslin and leads his own NY-based quintet Bien Sur!. Solla has been an active composer in chamber and symphonic music with such notable projects as Suite Piazzollana, a modern Tango/jazz inspired suite that is a homage to the guitar icon Astor Piazzolla. He released his 17-piece big band recording Puertos: Music from International Waters in 2019 and the album won a Latin Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album in 2020. In 2023 he received praise for his arrangements and orchestrations for his collaboration with Paquito D’Rivera titled Ritmo-The Chick Corea Symphony Tribute.  

Emilio Solla (photo credit unknown)

Handmade is a beautiful addition to this talented composer’s discography. The album is a tribute to craft, the art of working with your mind and hands. Given the rapid changes in the technologies that seem to alter almost every way we work and communicate, it is fitting that an artist like Solla recognizes that our work or our art,  a product of our creativity and hard achieved skill, is honestly realized by our own hands, our own voices, our own instruments and even in the case of dance, our feet. As such it needs to be honored and preserved to maintain the essential human connection we need to effectively communicate ideas. I believe Solla’s message here is that when technologies like robotic machines or AI can mimic our creativity and communicate soulless information or algorithmic generated art then we have lost something that we cannot afford to lose.

Solla’s La Inestable De Brooklyn, which loosely translates fittingly as The Unpredictable from Brooklyn, is made up of some top-tier musicians from NY.  The nonet includes Solla on piano; Tim Aracost on tenor saxophone , clarinet and bass clarinet; Sara Caswell is on violin; Edward Perez mans the double bass; Rogério Boccato provides drum work and percussion; Mike Fahie is on trombone; Rodolfo Zaneti is on bandoneon; David Smith plays trumpet and flugelhorn; Alejandro Avilés can be heard on soprano and alto saxophone, and flute; Facundo Colman provides percussion on track 2; and the vocal of Sofia Tosello on track 9.

Emilio Solla and La Inestable De Brooklyn

Solla opens the album with the third part of his “Suite de los Abrazo”- Bodegon Canibal or “Suite of Hugs or Embraces.”  He comments on his album notes that the three-piece suite should not be thought of as being required to be heard in a particular sequence and so he suggests that listeners might mix and match the suites. On the third suite, a gorgeous piece that demonstrates Solla’s creative use of the band’s diverse tonal basket, we hear Boccato’s drum and percussive work set the infective beat.  Armacost’s bass clarinet provides an unusual woody, tonal bass line before the remaining section adds the brass and woodwind color.  Solla’s piano adds sparse accents and Perez ‘s bass beautifully maintains the rhythm with Boccato. Avilés alto soars and then the total section creates a cacophonic but joyful canvas of color that includes inspired work by Armacost, Aviles, Smith, and Fahie. Caswell and Zanetti weave their two instruments in a particularly sympathetic way adding their tones as Solla’s arrangement swells with excitement and splendor. Wonderful.

The album continues with a homage to the compositions of Joni Mitchell. Solla starts out with a repeating piano line that is accented by Zanetti’s warm bandoneon and sweet Caswell’s violin. Solla skillfully orchestrates the instruments that he has available to him like an artist painting a picture and the results are gorgeous, but despite his reference to having referenced some of Mitchell’s compositions in this piece, I cannot tell which ones he used for the inspiration. Needless to say the man has a wellspring of imagination.

The second part of the suite” Suite do los Abrazo” is subtitled “Milonga MUtante” and is a piece that was inspired during the Covid pandemic.  Like most of Solla’s work, this piece tells a story, this one musically recreating the feel of being in an Emergency Room in the early days of the pandemic. Boccato’s drum work is evocative of the coming urgency. Solla uses the tango briefly before the group creates the hectic, frazzled and unsettling experience of being in that scary scene. Mike Fahie’s trombone provides an expressive solo, a voice that seems to be expressing his bewilder, lonely feel. The rest of the group adds to the cacophonic, unfettered frenzy of being there.

“Para el Agua” or “For the Water” was originally written as a solo piano piece by Solla. Here he arranges the music for the larger chamber group. Sara Caswell’ s violin lays out the opening lines over Boccato’s trap cadenced work and Solla’s ostinato piano work. Smith’s trumpet and Armacost’s bass clarinet and Zanetti’s bandoneon all add to the mix before Solla takes his most melodically gorgeous and harmonically inventive piano solo of the album. The arrangement bustles with tonal ideas that make this one stand out.

The final piece of the suite is subtitled “The Loss” and according to the liner notes was inspired by poetry. Solla’s piano spells out t moving ballad beautifully.  The group sets up the tension, the section swelling to evoke the coming loss. Edward Perez’s double bass offers a most facile and imaginative pizzicato solo that conjures up personal loss here. Perez is accompanied by intuitive violin work by Caswell and some emotive bandoneon work by Zanetti that sets the sorrowful mood perfectly

Solla is a master of the new tango and here he seems to be evoking the progressiveness of Miles Davis approach to music by naming this “Miles Tango.” This is not your father’s tango. Solla take the dance form and enlivens it with some of his most searching piano work on the album. The brass section wails- the rhythm section adds some funk bass and drum lines- Smith’s muted trumpet soars through the ozone. Solla creates some complex lines for the group to navigate as a unit and they do so precisely until the abrupt stop at the coda.

“Bird Song” is one of the most sonically inventive of the Solla’s songs, in no small part due to Sara Caswell’s violin eerily creating bird sounds that work so well with this composition. The music was commissioned by a chamber music ensemble from San Antonio, Texas. Solla envisioned a bird that flew easily between Mexico and Texas at the border, unencumbered by customs or immigration rules. Not only was the bird free, but this avian creature could also dance to Solla’s wonderful folk-inspired music. The group was a cornucopia of sounds weaving a magical environment- flutes, trumpets, woodwinds, piano, bandoneon- that created a splendid background for Caswell’s precocious bird. This cinematic piece is aural delight.

“La Carta” (The Letter) opens with a moving interaction between Caswell’s violin and Solla’s repeating piano lines. In the notes, Solla acknowledges that having been involved in the Ritmo project, where he orchestrated some of the great Chick Corea’s music, indelibly had an impact on his own playing. Solla confess that the piano ostinato on this one could easily have been inspired by Corea’s own “Children’s Song.” No matter what influences, here Solla’s music is a heartfelt, wordless letter that blossoms like a flower burgeoning to the warm light of the sun. The orchestration is gorgeous, as Solla blends the sounds of violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, bowed bass, and subtle percussive accents to his ringing, monotone piano lines.  After hearing this once, it’s almost impossible for the listener not to play it back multiple times to absorb the artistry of this gem of music making.

The final cut on the album is the only composition that uses voice as one of its elements. “De Viento y de Sal” or Of Wind and of Salt is perhaps the most traditional chamber music piece on the album and it features the gorgeously expressive voice of the Argentinian singer Sofia Tasello. The music is implemented by the sounds of Caswell violin and Zanetti’s wonderful Bandoneon. Tasello and the band deliver a fitting coda to this beautiful album.

Emilio Solla’s Handmade is truly an important album that revels in story-telling, marvels in astute arrangements, and embraces the listener in emotive feelings. It utilizes a band of talented and sympathetic musicians that bring the composer’s vision to life. As the composer says, the music is like a suite of a big hug or embrace!"   

Jack West and Walter Strauss Defy Classification with "Guitars of Life"

Jack West and Walter Strauss-Guitars of Life-Ota records

 

Acoustic guitar virtuosity of another color has been introduced to me with the distinctive acoustic album released in late January on Ota records. The duo album is titled Guitars on Life and features Bay Area based Jack West and his foil on this album, Walter Strauss. West has created his own following by creating a unique groove-centric acoustic guitar style. He utilizes his skillful abilities to create both bass and percussive effects simultaneously, as he plays his acoustic steel string guitar. Strauss, is another talented California based guitarist, who has built a reputation by incorporating Americana and interweaving it with African inspired rhythmic elements. For lovers of pure, unadulterated, acoustic magic, these two guys create a surprisingly satisfying set of music that exudes joy, creativity and is recorded live with no overdubs.

The album includes eight songs, the cover Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish”; all others co-composed by West and Strauss “More Guitars”, “Youth”, “Across the Bardo”, and “New Way Up; Double Bounce”, “Follow the Water Down”, and “OO”.

Jack West and Walter Strauss photo by Mitch Tobias

The music is played with an exuberance that cannot be staged. There is no pyrotechnics or electronic enhancements here, the music just flows out of these two accomplished guitarists. West is a virtual rhythm section onto himself, incorporating bass lines, percussive accompaniment and fluid slide work. Strauss’s facile finger picking is seamless and almost creates its own chant-like drone at times. You will undoubtedly find your own favorites on this fine album, but for me the rhythmically driven opener “More Guitars” provided a real chance to enjoy some intuitive interaction on display by these two. The two offer a unique take on Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” that reimagines this classic in a way that is retains the song’s soul while still intimate by using this hybrid Americana approach. 

Strauss’s ostinato driven “Double Bounce” has a real down-home funk to it. Feel your body start to absorb the groove. West’s combined bass-line and percussive rhythmic approach drives this one, and some fine finger picked lines by Strauss makes this one irresistible.

West’s “Across the Bardo” is another favorite, and  opens with Strauss’s drone-like finger picking as West’s glass slide work brings you to a new place. The music weaves elements of the blues, folk-inspired percussive rhythms, Americana, and a feel that recalls some of Irish folk music’s pathos.

The music of Guitars on Life certainly is hard to classify and why should we have to label it? There is a lot here to enjoy. These two draw from multiple inspirations, and when they mix them all together we get a very well performed set of music that has all the elements of what makes creative music so vibrant, exciting, and unpredictable.

Bassist/Composer Martin Wind Offers Some Beautiful Music on "STARS"

 

Martin Wind: STARS: Newvelle Records

The bassist Martin Wind has long been on my radar as one of the more inventive and melodic bass players around. I’ve seen him perform live with multi-reedist master Scott Robinson several years back and reviewed several of his past albums that have shown the breadth and depth of this man’s musicality. I had the opportunity to interview Wind back in 2014 with the release of his fabulous album Turn Out the Stars which you can read here. 

Wind’s latest release Stars is on Newvelle Records, a label that is celebrating its tenth-year anniversary this year. The album is a joyful and sonorous studio album that became available on January 30, 2026, and features Wind’s upright bass paired with a star-studded band that includes the master pianist Kenny Barron, the mellifluous clarinet of Anat Cohen and the creative drum work of Matt Wilson.

Matt Wilson, Anat Cohen, Martin Wind and Kenny Barron (photo credit unknown)

The fifty-eight-year-old Wind was born in Flensburg, Germany. He studied orchestral bass at the Music Conservatory at Cologne and received a Master’s in Jazz Performance and Composition at the Music Conservatory in Cologne.  Wind moved to New York in 1995, won third in the Thelonious Monk Bass Competition in Washington, D.C. and continued studies with Mike Richmond, Jim McNeely, Kenny Werner and Mike Holober to name a few.  The bassist has been a member of the faculty at New York University since 1997 and has been a faculty member of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra in Germany. He continues with   on- going musical relationships with European artists like Belgian guitar ace Philip Catherine, Dutch trumpeter Ack van Rooyen and German guitarist Ulf Meyer. With over fifteen albums that he has released as both a leader and co-leader, it is always worth following the progression of this man’s prolific work.  

Stars opens up with the sauntering “Passing Through,” in some ways the perfect composition that sets the tone and purpose that Wind has in mind when recording this album. The album is reflective, evokes memories from the bassist’s experiences as a musician, and has a quiet sense of elegant melodicism. “Passing Through” is a composition from the bassist/composer Aaron Bell. Bell was a one-time Ellington bassist and an inspiration. The music is deceptively simple, clear and narrative without being obvious. This newly assembled group reveals just how at ease they work together, allowing the music to gently unfold and wrap you with a blanket of joy. Cohen’s clarinet is warm, woody and provocative. Barron’s piano can at times evoke a down and dirty bluesy sense, but the man also has an undeniably elegant feel and a deep well of creativity to draw upon. Wilson’s drum kit is always joyful, like a toy box radiating bliss, and Wind’s warm pizzicato bass lines guide the leisurely shuffle expertly. Clearly this is Wind’s beautiful homage to a felloe player like Bell and a tip of his hat to the Ellingtonian era. Not to mention, this is a hell of a composition that is strangely seldom heard,

Duke Ellington and Aaron Bell (photo credit unknown)

“Life” is presumably a ballad composed by the leader Wind. It features some beautiful three-way improvisational lines by Cohen, Barron and Wind that weave themselves like sinewy silk threads into a melodic tapestry.

The album continues with “Black Butterfly,” a Duke Ellington composition that is played in a jazz-chamber ballad form. It features the vocal-like sound of Cohen’s resonating clarinet, and the heartbeat-like bass solo by Wind that glows with warmth and elegance. Barron’s accompaniment is superb, as Wilson keeps the pace with subtle ingenuity. The music is reminiscent of a simpler, relaxed, more elegant time.

“Moody” is a gentle, contemplative Wind composition. Lead by Cohen’s expressive clarinet's tubular sound and some dynamic counterpoint bass work by Wind, the music is ethereal. Hanging in the air like a reflective mood, not melancholic but deep in thought and reverend.

Wind gives a nod to the importance of bebop to the canon of music. Here he chooses Bud Powell’s iconic “Wail,” which was first heard on his album The Amazing Bud Powell from 1951. Powell had the lead horns of the powerful tenor of Sonny Rollins and Fats Navarro’s incendiary trumpet to trade ideas on this quick paced gem. Here Martin and Cohen lay out the challenging, circuitous lines of the melody concurrently with impeccable skill, but at a decidedly more relaxed attack. Wind shows that no matter how complex the music may be, it can be effectively entertaining and interesting at any pace if the core of the music’s message is retained by the artists presenting it.  Wind and mates let the music flow with satin smoothness and facility, and the results are rewarding. Kenny Barron’s piano work here is a master class of modern interpretation. Barron is a true descendant that preserves some of the history of jazz music in every note he plays.

Wind opens “The Feel of the Jazz,” another Ellington composition (also credited are Bobby Troup and Geore T. Simon), with an extended, plucky bass entre that hums with joy and creativity. The original release of this song was on Duke Ellington and John Coltrane from 1963 and included the rhythm section of  Aaron Bell on bass and drummer Sam Woodward. When Cohen’s clarinet enters this one, there is a sense of history meeting modernity. Barron’s piano interacts with Cohen’s clarinet as the song progresses and the two pros meld notes so easily at times with ease and familiarity that makes it look effortless.

“Pra Diza e a Deus” is a beautiful ballad composed by the Brazilian composers Edú Lobo and Torquato Neto. It was made popular by Sergio Mendez and Brasil ’66 from their album Look Around from 1967.  The English title of this song is “To Say Goodbye” and anyone who has heard this version can’t forget the sad voice of Sergio Mendes and beguiling sound of singer Lannie Hal or the vocalist Flora Purim’s moving version. For the bassist, this is another homage that recognizes just how much Brazilian music has influenced Wind and added to the jazz canon. Barron’s delicate solo opens this song, before Wind’s aching arco bowing of the bass gorgeously spells out the melody. Wilson drum work opens the rhythm with exquisite restraint, as Barron’s piano expands on the melody. When Cohen’s clarinet enters the mix it’s like her sound takes on the yearning, voice-like element that one remembers from the original. Despite being wordless, these guys transmit the pathos of the sentiment of  saying goodbye to a lover.

The album continues with “Standing at the Window Waving Goodbye,” another Wind composition, that deals with poignant moments of dealing with saying goodbye to someone who is important to you. This reflective, unresolved piece is another example of the music that speaks the most to this bassist as a composer. Cohen’s clarinet seems to float above the music, as Barron’s piano is perfectly supportive. Barron’s solo work always elevates the possibilities of harmonic inventiveness and Wind and Wilson maintain the breezy rhythm.  

Mitchell Parish’s “Stars Fell on Alabama” is a ballad played at a slow gait that has an easy swing to it, and has an obvious tie-back to the album’s theme, Stars. Cohen’s burnished clarinet resonates with sustained warmth, and she navigates the melody with reverence and unadorned emotion. This song brings you back to a time when the pace was more forgiving and a twilight concert offered at a local gazebo could allow you to just sit back and get lost in the music.

My digital release had two bonus songs, the first is a Bill Mays composition “Blues with Two Naturals.” Mays is a pianist/composer that is part of the Martin Wind Quartet. Mays is known for his harmonic humor and on this one he naturalizes the two notes in the key signature, counter to a standard blues form that uses flattened notes.  Kenny Barron, Wind and Wilson make this one all their own.

“Marc’s Moment” is another digital release bonus track that Wind composed and didn’t include on the album. This closer is a joyous, free flowing song that has a medium swing feel to it. Cohen’s clarinet just hovers like a feather, twirling up and gliding down along the thermals as the rhythm section is led by Wind’s booming bass, Barron’s pianistic accompaniment and Wilson’s gossamer drum work.

Martin Wind’s Stars offers the listener some joyful, easy listening music played by a remarkably cohesive band, whose artistry should not be missed.