Billy Stein

Billy Stein is a guitarist born in Brooklyn, New York. While attending Hunter College, where he would earn a BA in Music Composition & Theory, he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study classical guitar with Leonid Bolotine. Stein would then become involved in multiple music scenes in and around NYC including R&B, funk, rock, salsa, bossa nova, as well as both mainsteam and free jazz. Over the years he has performed and recorded with a wide variety of musicians including Milt Hinton, Sahib Shihab, Joe Blanco, The Coasters, Rashid Bakr as well as leading his own trio which recorded the critically acclaimed CD “Hybrids”. Billy and multi-reed player Michael Moss have recently released the duo CD “Intervals”.

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Album Review

Hybrids by Troy Collins

”Guitarist Billy Stein has been hidden in plain sight for almost 30 years, playing in New York with an impressively wide spectrum of players. ...The rhythmic empathy within the trio is strong, as is their ability to anticipate and dovetail each other’s next move. They get so deep in the pocket that they end up somewhere else.” Bill Shoemaker, Point of Departure

“A self-proclaimed organic coalescence of the straightahead and avant garde worlds, Stein straddles freeform improvisation and structured composition with remarkable consistency.” Troy Collins, All About Jazz

“Hybrids” Top Ten CDs 2006 Nate Dorward, Coda Magazine

“Hybrids” Honorable Mention - Jazz Consumer Guide Tom Hull, Village Voice

“.....what really shines is the instinctive development of a sound which is cultured (Stein graduated from Hunter College and also has classical guitar experience) and, at the very same moment, raw enough to be accepted as pure intuitional language.” Massino Ricci, Touching Extremes

“...(Hybrids) has a compelling nature that makes you yearn for another go around