Trifecta

I was a guitar player ever since I was a young boy. I studied for many years, but the reason I quit was because I couldn't find a personal, differentiated, unique voice. The guitar is a difficult instrument for that purpose. It doesn't lend itself, like the saxophone for instance, to a different way of responding to each player. With woodwind instruments, factors like embouchure, mouthpiece, lung size, and height immediately affect the sound; they are flexible and responsive to sound imagination. Whatever you think comes out—you make the sound.

The guitar, with its geometric fingerboard, can lead musicians to merely recreate patterns. Therefore, I deeply admire the musicians featured in Trifecta because I know how individual their voices are on an instrument that is otherwise often oblivious to individuality.

Because they are all so different from each other, our interaction was very different. Although it is the same instrument, each project sounds unique. It made sense to me to group them together in a CD box format to offer the listener a panoramic view of contemporary guitar as played by three of its major voices

- Ivo Perelman