Back in the early 60's I was browsing through a small store front music store in lower Manhattan and came across an album with a mandolin concerto on one side, and a guitar concerto on the other. It was on the Vox label... a prominent label for classical music at that time. I bought it, and was really transported away by the mandolin concerto. I almost wore that record flat, over the years. About 20 years ago, I tried to find the mandolin concerto on CD and enlisted a person I knew in a record store who claimed he could find any classical music ever recorded on CD. He spent months looking for it, using every obscure resource at his disposal, and came up empty handed.

Part of the problem is that no one is sure who the composer was. It is "credited" to Guilani, but there were several composers of that name, and there is no documentation to which one this was... or whether it was just another Guilani who never had another piece preserved. A couple of years ago, I finally found a CD, released on the Erato label. The liner notes are in German. Because of the uncertainty of who wrote the piece, I was very hesitant when I put the CD on the first time.

But, as Bobert would say, "Dang" it's that good ole boy Guilani! It sounds just as great as it did that first day I took it home nad put it on the turntable in the early 60's.

Jerry