Richard Barrett is on a mission to make you a better blues player – with full audio examples and backing tracks

Andrey Gugnin (piano) Hyperion CDA684712 83 mins This album of Russian ballet transcriptions sparkles like a glass bauble hanging amidst the fairy lights. Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky wrote so colourful

On entering a room containing a piano, what pianist doesn’t turn white at the command, ‘You can play – let’s hear you!’ You thought you were visiting friends, not giving a performance, so of course yo

MATEUS ASATO IS the kind of guitarist we haven’t heard much of lately — a true original. He doesn’t do anything particularly outrageous or revolutionary — there’s no crazy gimmick (yet) that he’ll be

‘We’re going to have a tonal centre and tap our feet, and that’s the way it is.’ Steve Reich is in full flow, talking to me from his home in New York. ‘The big break, the knife down the line, was betw

What was your first guitar? I wanted a guitar when I was 10, but it took until I was 12 before my parents gave in. We went to a shop in King’s Cross in North London, and they had guitars hanging up, i