Solo Guitarra is the first ECM album under the name of the Barcelona guitarist José Luis Montón, thirteen pieces for unaccompanied guitar. Twelve are his own compositions, most of them built on a specific flamenco form, and one is an arrangement after Johann Sebastian Bach. There is no second instrument, no palmas and no cajón, so everything rests on Montón's writing and touch, and on the way he links flamenco with the classical guitar tradition.
Montón was born in Barcelona in 1962 and had a long career in Spain before ECM. His discography starts with Flamenco entre amigos in 1996 and includes Aroma, Manantial and De la felicidad. His projects have involved the singers Mayte Martín and Carmen Linares and the violinist Ara Malikian. He reached the label as guitarist on Amina Alaoui's Arco Iris. During that session producer Manfred Eicher decided that a Montón solo record belonged on ECM. A year later, in April 2011, it was recorded at the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer. Montón also wrote the liner notes.
The track list names the form behind each piece. The two openers are farrucas: Rota moves with a light, understated virtuosity, while Española takes the same form somewhere darker. Son & Kete is a bulería, a tight spiral of rhythm. Further on come tangos (Altolaguirre, Hontanar), a taranta, a soleá, a seguirilla in Detallitos and a guajira in Piel suave. Rasgueado strums and percussive slaps on the body of the guitar keep the textures changing. At the centre of the programme sits Air, Montón's reading of the famous movement from Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3, the clearest of the album's bridges to the classical repertoire.
ECM placed the disc next to the finest solo guitar albums in its catalogue. Reviewing it in 2012 for the ECM archive Between Sound and Space, Tyran Grillo heard Montón "turning six strings into a choir just yearning to proclaim and meditate in turn". In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Ulrich Olshausen described a heady union of deep flamenco feeling with classical technique and virtuosity. He singled out the small delays and accelerations of the phrasing, and music that tells wordless stories of dance and reflection.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2246, first released in 2012.
