Jazz Articles about Ryan Carraher

About Ryan Carraher

Album Review

Ryan Carraher: Obscure Sorrows

Read "Obscure Sorrows" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
December 7, 2018

Boston-based guitarist/composer Ryan Carraher chose a unique theme for his sophomore album: each track is inspired by a word from John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Koenig's website and YouTube channel present made-up words meant to complete our emotional language: “each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language--to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don't yet have a word for." Carraher's quintet is almost repeated from his previous group album Vocturnal ...

Album Review

Ryan Carraher: Vocturnal

Read "Vocturnal" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
June 16, 2016

Guitarist and composer Ryan Carraher is blessed with an enormous technique and a fertile and inventive musical mind (having received the Achievement Award from the guitar department of the Berklee College of Music), which is doubly impressive in one so young. Carraher states that the compositions in Vocturnal “are heavily inspired by the classical composers of the 20th century (Messiaen, Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, etc.) and the expressive freedom of jazz." In this he has beautifully succeeded, but what ...