Alekos K. Vretos was born in Athens in 1976. In 1978 his family moved to Argos were he grew up. His father was in love with music so he took him for piano lessons at the age of three. That was Alekos' first contact with music. His first piano teacher was Mrs. Eleni Apostolaki. At the age of sixteen he decided that his route in life would be... [+] Read More

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Guitarist Al di Meola first rose to prominence as a blazing jazz fusion player before his playing matured and he began to conquer other styles, such as acoustic Latin music. Born on July 22, 1954, in Jersey City, NJ, di Meola briefly studied at the Berklee School of Music in Boston during the early '70s before accepting a job replacing guitarist... [+] Read More

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Baden Powell is a Brazilian musician with a solid international reputation. A gifted instrumentalist and composer, he bridges the gap between classical artistry and popular warmth and was a key figure in the bossa nova movement.

Born in the Varre e Sai district, he was baptized after his grandfather, a musician and conductor... [+] Read More

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Carlos Barbosa-Lima has long been a masterful interpreter of a wide range of melodic music. A brilliant acoustic guitarist, Barbosa-Lima gives taste and feeling to works that range from Gershwin to Bach, Jobim to Debussy. Although not an improviser, Barbosa-Lima has been featured on an extensive series of recordings for Concord's Concerto and... [+] Read More

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Tasteful, low-key, and ingratiatingly melodic, Charlie Byrd had two notable accomplishments to his credit -- applying acoustic classical guitar techniques to jazz and popular music and helping to introduce Brazilian music to mass North American audiences. Born into a musical family, Byrd experienced his first brush with greatness while a... [+] Read More

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Dori Caymmi is an internationally celebrated composer and singer, having an expressive production recorded by many important artists worldwide, along with a prominent career as an arranger and producer, having also written music for soundtracks.

The son of composer Dorival Caymmi and former singer Stella Maris (Adelaide Tostes... [+] Read More

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With the death from lung cancer of El Camarón de la Isla (born José Monge Cruz) on July 2, 1992, flamenco lost one of its greatest vocalists. The son of a basket-maker, de la Isla revolutionalized the flamenco tradition with his contemporary-minded approach. His debut 1969 album, Con la Colaboracion Especial de Paco de Lucia, recorded with the... [+] Read More

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Esteban Figueroa – Composer & Guitarist
At the age of 6, Esteban started his musical journey with the guitar.
Having learned to play guitar in Chile, he was heavily influenced in the traditional forms of Latin American rhythms. Once in Canada, he began to incorporate the influences of Rock & Blues into his music although always... [+] Read More

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The Gipsy Kings are largely responsible for bringing the joyful sounds of progressive pop-oriented flamenco, called Sevillana in Spain, to the world. The band started out in Arles, a village in southern France during the '70s when brothers Nicolas and Andre Reyes, the sons of renowned flamenco artist Jose Reyes, teamed up with their cousins... [+] Read More

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A trio, featuring brothers Antonio and Juan Miguel Carmona and their cousin, Juan Carmona, Ketama is one of the leading groups of the "new flamenco" movement. Since releasing their self-titled debut album in 1985, the trio has directed the evolution of flamenco as a world-savvy music. In addition to their own albums, which fuse flamenco with... [+] Read More

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As one of the pioneers of jazz-rock -- perhaps the pioneer in the ears of some -- Larry Coryell deserves a special place in the history books. He brought what amounted to a nearly alien sensibility to jazz electric guitar playing in the 1960s, a hard-edged, cutting tone, phrasing and note-bending that owed as much to blues, rock and even... [+] Read More

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Spanish guitarist Moraito plays pure, unadulterated flamenco, free of the new age influences that have crept into the most popular (at least on American shores) recent exponents of the style. Moraito was born Manuel Moreno Junquera in 1956 in the Santiago district of Jerez de la Frontera, a town in the Andalusian region; his family was already... [+] Read More

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