The New Jazz Now series is pleased to present an evening of new territories on acoustic guitar in a double solo concert with Mustafa Stefan Dill and Barry Chabala, Saturday November 16th, 7:30 pm. at Entropy Gallery, 1220 Parkway Dr., Santa Fe, NM 87507. Admission is $10. 

Mustafa Stefan Dill is best known for his fiery, virtuosic amalgam of Middle Eastern, jazz, rock and experimental elements on electric guitar and oud in such projects as Pray For Brain, Love Unfold The Sun, and the newly formed Present Moment. His penchant for pushing the edge can be traced back as far as 1988 when Guitar Player magazine heralded his early electric work as "a maniacal tour to force of outside extremism." 

In between rounds of plugging in, however, Dill focused on acoustic work, exploring how the worlds of free improvisation and modern composition might intersect with a pre-Paco de Lucia flamenco guitar vocabulary.

" I heard connections, hinges, between these genres," Dill said. "A certain dissonance in the harmonic voicings, the fluidity of tempo, the high level of improvisational interplay between guitarist and singer, for example. I hear a lot of connective tissue between the two worlds - not parallel bundles but interesting, flexible hinges, joints, angles, sinews, tendons."

From this came two well acclaimed CDs (Warning Clothed in Bright Robes of Dawn and Sangre del Rio) which in turn put Dill on the path to jazz and guitar festivals throughout Europe - including a performance at the annual Total Music Meeting Festival in 1994 for Free Music Production (FMP), the pinnacle presenter and organizer of free jazz in Europe at the time. 

Coincidentally, the November 16 upcoming concert is almost 30 years to the day of the FMP date – and will be Dill's first solo acoustic performance in 20 years, he estimates.

Dill began re-visiting his acoustic approach about two years ago. " After the cancer and the open heart surgery, I began hearing it again," Dill said. " and yet I'm careful to not let this be a retread or nostalgia trip. The intervening 30 years has a lot of life lived in it, and that brings something to the table as well - the segments on the oud, for example, are a new element."
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Opening the evening is a performance by guitarist Barry Chabala , who hails from Passaic, New Jersey. A prolific and uncompromising guitarist, improvisor and composer, he picked up a guitar at the age of five and began a musical journey that has gone many places, from The Beatles and The Stones, to Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Yes and Genesis, to Pat Metheny, Alan Holdsworth and Bill Frisell, to Derek Bailey and Michael Pisaro. Chabala blends it all into a personal, creative voice.