SB Acoustic presents: Sean McGowan & Pierre Bensusan

SB ACOUSTIC PRESENTS: Sean McGowan & Pierre Bensusan

Sean McGowan is a fingerstyle jazz guitarist who combines many diverse musical influences with unconventional techniques to create a broad palette of textures within his compositions and arrangements for solo guitar. He is considered by his professional peers as one of the finest jazz guitarists in the world.

“Sean McGowan’s playing and arranging are world class. My Fair Lady delivers with beauty, imagination, and stunning technique.” – Fingerstyle Guitar Journal

“Sean’s impressive style is so musical. You are transported by his selection of songs; but within the compositions is a masterful guitarist using multi faceted guitar arrangements at the same time, creating a single guitar orchestra!” - Eric Johnson

“Sean McGowan is the most promising young solo guitarist I have ever heard.” - Tuck Andress

“Sean McGowan has found that sweet spot where the worlds of jazz and fingerstyle guitar intersect” - Alex de Grass

French-Algerian acoustic guitar virtuoso, vocalist and composer Pierre Bensusan, surnamed “Mister DADGAD”, has taken his unique sound to all corners of the globe.

Voted Best World Music Guitarist by Guitar Player Magazine reader’s Poll, and winner of the Grand Prix du Disque upon his debut at the Montreux Festival, the Independent Music Award, and the Rose d’Or, Pierre is recognized as one of the greatest guitar players of the 21st century.

Born in French-Algeria, Pierre Bensusan's family moved to Paris when he was 4. Influenced in those early days by the folk revival blooming in Britain, France and North America, Bensusan began first to explore his own diverse musical heritage and then moved to the horizons beyond. He signed his first recording contract at 17, and one year later his first album, "Près de Paris”, won the in Switzerland.

Pierre's name became synonymous with contemporary acoustic guitar genius, long before the terms New Age or World Music were invented. He has literally created a style of playing with the ability to make a single guitar sound like an entire band as he brings the audience on a mesmerizing musical journey. Bensusan is more than what any musician or music lover expects from a guitarist. He is a composer as well as a bilingual and original and improvisational vocalist, with his own scat technique.

Immortalized by the tune “Bensusan” written in tribute by the late Michael Hedges, and referenced as an important inspiration to many other great musicians, Pierre Bensusan is a one-of-a-kind artist whose music transcends genre and time, with an uninhibited sense of musical freedom and expression, a sense of something both playful and serious, otherworldly yet right here right now. His playing defies classification - crossing world, classical, jazz, traditional, folk, pop and more. None can be isolated as simply “World Music”, “Celtic”, "Arabic" or “French”; rather, they represent Pierre’s genuine vocabulary and the best part of our world in its current state, a world sharing itself.

"One of the most unique and brilliant acoustic guitar veterans in the world music scene today" - L.A. Times

“It’s like the guitar has been given free rein to play itself!”