Mikkel Ploug - Alleviation (CD)

Ploug's works for solo guitar, played on a gorgeous-sounding Gibson Banner, access folk, jazz and classical styles.This is a record for guitar connoisseurs of all kinds.Last year Danish jazz guitarist Mikkel Ploug fell in love with a rare all-mahogany 1945 Gibson Banner acoustic guitar that he ran into while on tour in the US. Back home he ended up creating a whole program of new compositions on it, interweaving aspects of folk (fingerpicking), jazz, and contemporary classical styles such as minimalism. Solo acoustic guitar music has seldom sounded so tonally warm, intricately structured, and rhythmically alive as this. Much of the music also has an intimate, inward-looking quality about it that seems to hark back to the origins of folk/blues guitar as a very personal accompanist to the human voice.Some pieces are in the nature of tributes - to Ben Monder, Steve Reich, Olivier Messiaen. Some offer unusual departures from standard jazz or classical harmony, others feature sophisticated