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A
mainstay on the World Music and Nuevo Flamenco scene and up there
with the pre-eminent contemporary-instrumental, guitar-based American
recording artists, Lawson Rollins puts his career into perspective
with the 2018 CD release of Airwaves: The Greatest Hits.
A celebration of his seven acclaimed solo albums, Airwaves
takes the best of Lawson’s tracks and presents them as radio
edits and chill remixes. Reasons for this are clear in that, these
concise versions present the most immediate elements and edits them
down time-wise, making them more radio friendly. Describing Airwaves,
Lawson explains, “It’s a collection of tracks off
of the various albums. The past seven albums have all spawned, usually
a couple songs per album that have done pretty well on the radio chart.
So, a lot of these songs were special radio edits that even have different
performers that you wouldn’t even hear on the album versions
and some other changes that I just decided to do for the sake of creating
something unique for radio. But I never made these publicly available,
so I decided this would be the perfect chance after seven albums to
collect them together, plus two add a couple of new tracks.”
As Lawson says, Airwaves adds in new parts to certain tracks—for
example “In Motion”, from Lawson’s 2008 debut Infinita,
now features an appearance by sax player Praful. Airwaves
also features radio edit tracks from Lawson’s Infinite
Chill album, which features tracks remixed by Shahin Shahida.
A pair of newly recorded tracks—“Prado”, featuring
violinist Mads Tolling and “World Of Wonder”, featuring
fellow guitarist Stephen Duros and 3rd Force—shows
some new and intriguing musical directions Lawson is currently taking.
Much has been said about Lawson’s agile Spanish nylon string
meets classical guitar style and techniques, which also incorporates
elements of electronica, instrumental, Euro-classical, World Music
and chill music—a hybrid sound that truly sets Lawson apart from
many other Nuevo Flamenco, Latin music and even smooth jazz guitarists.
As Lawson himself says, “The hybrid factor is really something
that I embrace. The word traditional is not in my vocabulary.”
A fine representation of a populist, virtuoso and visionary guitarist
for the 21st century, the Global Groove of Airwaves places
the music of Lawson Rollins in a colorful and appealing musical light.