Pierre Bensusan Continues Association With Lowden Guitars on New Tour

Pierre Bensusan's upcoming 40th Anniversary Tour of Europe and North America will also be a celebration of a dynamic 35-year association with his longtime guitar maker Lowden Guitars (www.georgelowden.com).

The contemporary world music and master fingerstyle guitarist (www.pierrebensusan.com) and the Ireland-based manufacturer have announced that Lowden Guitars will be sponsoring the tour, which begins with 22 dates Bensusan's home country of France from January to March 2013 (starting January 30 in Paris) and includes about 40 dates in the U.S. and Canada (beginning March 15, 2013 in Santa Monica, Calif.), stops in Montreal (April 25) and wraps with Mendocino, Calif. (May 10) and then play about 25 shows in Germany, Austria, UK and Ireland.

George Lowden, who is coincidentally celebrating his 40th year as a guitar maker and crafted his first guitar for Bensusan in 1978, is building a new 40thAnniversary Signature Guitar for him - a model of which will be given away as a competition prize at the end of 2014. The competition to win the model will commence with the start of Bensusan's tour in February.

Bensusan's debut album Près de Paris, released 35 years ago, launched one of contemporary world music's most extraordinary, multi-faceted careers for an instrumental guitarist. Bensusan, a French-Algerian artist globally renowned as the "Mozart of Guitar," is still conquering the world with his renowned melodic and rhythmic strings, while touring regularly throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and the U.S. Among many other accolades, he has won Guitar Player Magazine Reader's Choice Award as "Best World Music Guitar Player" in 2008 and his album Intuite won the American Association of Independent Music's Best Acoustic Album of 2002.

Bensusan has just released Encore, an ambitious and expansive 3-CD, 35-track retrospective collection celebrating his 40 years as a globetrotting live performer.

The guitarist's name became synonymous with contemporary acoustic guitar genius, long before the terms New Age, New Acoustic Music or World Musicwere invented. He has the ability to make a single guitar sound like an entire band as he brings the audience on a mesmerizing musical journey. And yet, Bensusan is more than what any musician or music lover expects from a guitarist. He is a composer as well as a bilingual and a brave improvisational vocalist, melding whistles and resonant low notes with something like his own scat technique.

A huge influence on fingerstyle the world over for decades, Bensusan's solo acoustic guitar work has featured use of the DADGAD tuning system and electronics such as delays, distortions and volume pedals, which have been largely abandoned on recent tours. Over the past 35 years, Bensusan has been widely recognized as the world master of this type of tuning.

Among a handful of legendary pairings of players and guitars, the association between Lowden Guitars and Bensusan has a unique place in acoustic guitar history. In 1978, George Lowden built Bensusan what was then called a modelS22 (today it would be called an O22), and aside from a few brief diversions, Bensusan's famous jumbo-body "Old Lady" has been his near constant companion ever since. In 2009, Lowden began to work on a replacement for Bensusan's aging instrument, providing a "New Lady" for Bensusan, and leading to the introduction of the Pierre Bensusan Signature model.

Bensusan first heard about Lowden in 1977, in Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland, through a friend of Lowden's, Alistair Burke. The guitarist met Lowden in person on his next Irish tour two years later, a year after Burke brought the first guitar Lowden made for him in Paris. Bensusan recorded his third album Musiques with it, and "just about every record since then. The first Lowden and I have both toured the world many times and played thousands of concerts.

Discussing the dynamic qualities of Lowden's guitars that have inspired him to use them now for decades, Bensusan adds, "My first impression was that Lowden looks for the same quality that classical guitar builders are after: sobriety, unflashy, beautiful, no shinny nor clicking artifacts, no mother of pearls on the fretboard -- just a sparse, beautiful instrument that serves sound and music, which both are at the end the real ornaments. Lowden Guitars have a musical and yet 'neutral' sound. They sound big and yet, you can refine your approach and play sound in 3D, and really 'work' the history of the note and play with dynamics. It has a personality of its own without having an overwhelming color that would overdrive the music. Music is sound, and these guitars produce sound generously with all the requirements and no short cut, nor compromise. This guitar disappears behind the music."

Bensusan is equally effusive about his guitar maker's legacy: "Lowden has brought a new aesthetic and ethic to the steel string guitar making that have influenced a whole generation of luthiers. He has also been copied but never equaled. George always privileges quality, content, integrity, meaningful musical instrument over economical success. His guitars are reasonably priced so that genuine musicians can afford them. The inside is as important as the outside. The outside, while being elegant is never overwhelmingly shinning nor distracting.

"With Lowden," he adds, "sound comes first and aesthetic, luthery and ergonomics are there to serve, hand in hand. His choices and sometimes uncompromised direction have made his road at times challenging, austere, lonely, but at the end, I truly believe people are grateful for what he has done and incarnates today. He has, like myself, many loyal and faithful fans all over the world, and simply continues to reaffirm his presence as one of the most unique, eloquent, elegant, talented luthiers in the world."