The Latest from Paper Moon, my guitar duo…

While I generally play flamenco, Spanish classical, and various south American styles as a soloist, I also have a guitar duo where I get to explore music from all over the globe.  With guitarist Joe Amato, we call ourselves Paper Moon (yes, that’s also the name of my guitar school here in San Diego), and we play all kinds of stuff from gypsy jazz, jazz standards, to more rock-influenced instrumentals.  Joe plays the 7-string guitar, which is common in Brazil, as well as a gypsy jazz guitar, and I play my flamenco guitar and also a gypsy jazz guitar, depending on the tune.  We love to improvise so many of our live shows feature impromptu riffs and melodies we’ll make up on the spot – sometimes a song will morph into another song we didn’t expect: we once started a rendition of Malagueña which quickly turned into Miserlou, and we ended the piece by blending it into Ravel’s Bolero…  We’re working on a new CD which, like our others, will be mainly original music we have composed in different styles.  This time, we’ll be recording our arrangments of 3 songs which we haven’t written: the Brazilian composer Joao Pernambuco’s “Sons de Carilhoes,” and Jacob do Bandolim’s “Santa Morena,” along with Argentine Angel Villoldo’s classic Tango “El Choclo.”  These are great tunes and ones we love playing, so we’re going to put them on the CD too.

Paper Moon performs most often at private events around San Diego and Los Angeles (we just returned from playing in LA a few hours ago) but you can catch us every Friday for the next 2 months at Westfield UTC from noon till 3pm, from September 7th through November 9th.

We have just posted our music on Soundcloud, here are 2 original songs from our last CD Little Venices: