I've put out a new solo CD called Welcome Home. It's all original music and definitely jazz, but in a variety of rhythmic styles and moods. Some are solo versions of tunes I recorded with my World on a String project and there is definitely a strong Brazilian influence on several tracks, like the opening tune, Walking. That's a baiao, a rhythm from northeast Brazil, and there's also a samba, and a slow rubato tune that ends as a bossa nova. There are several jazz tunes, one in a Latin rhythm and others that are harder to define - The title tune is in 5/4 and is influenced by my listening to African music and guitar playing, and that influence shows itself in the tune River as well. It's a very exciting body of work for me. Most of the pieces started out as a tune, or sometimes just a rhythmic vamp. And of course I wanted solos, improvisations in them. Some stayed clearly there, like the Opener, which is very traditional and easy to follow. Others started from the same point, a song form, a melody with a clear harmonic structure, but then may have evolved with introductions, key changes and/or tempo changes for different sections etc, though all still based on the original tune. River is like that. I wrote that one years ago and at first played it with a group only. Like the Opener it was just a straight blowing tune, though longer and more complex. As I played it over the years I came up with an introduction, key changes and a meter change for one section. And those things are all variations in their own way too, but now they're not just melodic variations over the repeating chord structure but variations in texture, tempo, key. Bartok is a favorite composer of mine and he, for example, does all these things wonderfully in his music - or Beethovan of course. And then there's Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn...Whew!!! My first solo guitar CD I released in 1997, "Blues for the Millennium. The second Dusk to Dawn came a few years later and got an rave write up from Just Jazz Guitar Magazine (see "reviews"). Both feature my arrangements of standards, Brazilian tunes, a few originals, and on the first one, 7 arrangements of mine of some of Bartok's Mikrokosmos. I've done solo concerts and clinics/master classes at Dartmouth College and William Patterson University, the American Institute of the Guitar in New York, the Newark Museum, Washington's Pocket Series in NYC, and solo gigs like Le Madeleine in NY where I often fill in for Gene Bertoncini.