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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".

Billy Stein: Hybrids

by Troy Collins
July 27, 2006

Hybrids, guitarist Billy Stein's debut recording, arrives after thirty years of playing sideman to some of the finest musicians in the New York area. A singular stylist with an unorthodox approach, Stein shares the same off-center sensibility as stylistic peers like Bern Nix, Joe Morris and Michael Musillami.

While attending Milt Hinton's Jazz Workshop at Hunter College in the 1970s, Stein found a kindred spirit in percussionist Kevin Norton, who now runs the Barking Hoop label. In the ...

"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