Alone Together

Karl Ratzer, an Austrian jazz guitarist, and Ed Neumeister, an American jazz trombonist, have been playing together for 10 years in various bands of the guitar player and now have also gotten together as a duo.

Alone Together is a duo homage to the Great American Songbook of Jazz. Karl Ratzer’s two original compositions, “Sabah El Nur” and “Senor Lopez”, fit in harmoniously with the jazz classics “Body and Soul”, “I Thought About You”, and “Alone Together”. All are played with inimitable verve, creativity, and with a deep feeling for the songs (lyrics included), even though most of the tracks are instrumental.

“I’m Old Fashioned”, the only song sung by Karl Ratzer, reminds one of Chet Baker, with whom the guitarist toured. This duo of superlatives, in the rather rare line-up of guitar and trombone, impressively prove, by its interpretations, that jazz standards are not old-fashioned or out of date, but that their essence includes something eternal, a timelessness, that touches young and old today as it did yesterday.

The unmistakable atmosphere of the 1920s and ‘30s New York awakens to new pulsating life on this album.