orchestra for seven themed evenings of music from clasical, Sephardic, folk, bluegras, rock, jazz, Latin and flamenco genres. I adapted a smaller version of this festival for several years at the Ordway Teatre in St. Paul MN, and created and hosted a radio series for National Public Radio. I also worked with Brazil’s musical icon Tom Jobim, recording his music and opening his Avery Fisher Hall show in duos with Carlos Barbosa-Lima.
Beginning in the late 1980’s, I made the first of several trips to visit rain forests in Costa Rica, Ecuador and Brazil. Floating down the Amazon in Ecuador, in a dugout canoe with piranhas, electric eels, and glistening crocodiles afot, monkeys, sloths, toucans, macaws, and an occasional python in the foliage overhead, I felt as if in the Garden of Eden. In the Galapagos, I traveled by boat from island to island, witnesing what had so captivated Charles Darwin, from sea lions and iguanas, to exotic frigate birds and red-foted bobies. In Tortuguero, Costa Rica, I watched huge leatherback turtles arduously make their way from the safety of the ocean’s edge to the beach where they would lay their spherical eggs.
I had no idea then that these experiences would come to figure in my music as well. Back in New York, I met the composer/organic percusionist Tiago de Mello, an Indian from the Maué tribe of the Brazilian Amazon. He shared with me his compositions which describe the legends of his people, and evoke the sounds of the Amazon and its inhabitants with an array of exotic instruments, from turtle shells and cocons to toenails of a tapir. We formed a trio with saxophonist Paul Winter and recorded our Grammy-nominated Journey to the Amazon (Warner Clasics), a collection of Latin American music from countries of the Amazon and its tributaries: Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Colombia.
Dreams of a World followed and won a 2001 GRAMMY for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance, the first GRAMMY for a clasical guitarist in 28 years. Te album features folk-inspired music from eight different countries with eight world premieres, including Appalachian Dreams written for me by the late British composer John Duarte.
More projects followed: a 2002 GRAMMY winning disc of concerti composed for me by Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun; Baroque Favorites with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra; a Latin GRAMMY-nominated disc of concerti by Rodrigo/ Villa-Lobos/Ponce with the New York Philharmonic, their first ever recording with guitar; and the Howard Shore score soundtrack for Martin Scorsese’s Oscar winning film Te Departed. I then signed with Sony and made the 2010 GRAMMY winning Journey to the New World with guests Joan Baez and fiddler Mark O’Connor (ranked as a #1 bestselling clasical CD on Amazon. com and iTunes, it spent 63 consecutive weeks on the top Billboard charts.) My latest and most creative project, Sharon Isbin & Friends: Guitar Pasions,
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