About

Benji Kaplan is an award winning composer, guitarist & vocalist who has been featured in Billboard, JazzTimes and Downbeat magazines. Described by Acoustic Guitar as “Imaginative nylon string explorations, nothing short of miraculous.”

Music

The son of a Cuban-Jewish percussionist father and an Austrian-Jewish visual artist mother, with 7 albums to date, Kaplan made multiple excursions to Brazil as a teenager and an adult, and he offers a unique look at jazz and classical music informed by his vast musical experiences performing, writing, studying and teaching with master Brazilian composers/performers since the age of 18. Kaplan’s frame of reference in a given moment might be the seven-string guitar language of Rio’s samba and choro traditions, or Sinatra and Caymmi, or perhaps Rachmaninoff, Debussy and Mahler. Melodic displacement, interludes and detours within the forms, unconventional modulations, an entirely original new intro in the case of “But Not for Me,” a quasi-vaudevillian tour de force on the aptly titled “Anything Goes”: Kaplan brings all these devices and composerly details into unity in a way that expands the parameters of the nylon-string acoustic guitar in jazz.

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