AC/DC

Glass Menagerie: Mike Stern (electric guitar), Michal Urbaniak (electric violin), Gil Goldstein (keyboards), Tim Landers (electric bass) and Billy Cobham (drums, percussion). From the album Stratus (1981) by Billy Cobham’s Glass Menagerie.

Gil Goldstein is an American pianist, keyboardist, accordionist, arranger, composer and record producer. For nearly four decades he has designed the musical project of some of most jazz’s prominent artists, and in doing so he has become an influential figure himself. Endowed with an innate sense of compositional structure and harmonic balance, he has written arrangements for 46 albums and has produced 18. He has played with David Sanborn, Al Jarreau, Chris Botti, Jim Hall and Michael Brecker, and has toured with Joe Lovano , Chet Baker, Astrud Gilberto, Michael Franks, Lee Konitz, Wayne Shorter, Ray Helen Merrill, Stan Getz, Jaco Pastorius, Ray Barretto, Bobby McFerrin, Pat Martino, Boz Scaggs and The Gil Evans Orchestra.

Born in Baltimore, Goldstein began playing the accordion when he was five years old, but eventually switched to the piano, even though later rediscovered his first instrument and incorporated it into jazz vocabulary. His studies were extensive: after high school he enrolled at American University in Washington, D.C., then at Berklee College of Music in Boston, afterwards at the University of Maryland, where he received his bachelor’s degree in music in 1973, a year later his master’s degree at the University of Miami and finally his doctorate at the Union Graduate School in 1988.

In 1974 he moved to New York and during the rest of the decade he performed with different musicians. In 1976 he collaborated with post-bop guitarist Pat Martino in Exit, We’ll Be Together Again in duet and Starbrigh, and in 1977 with the famous Puerto Rican percussionist Ray Barretto on Eye of the Beholder playing salsa. In 1978 he released his first album as a leader Pure as Rain, in which he played in duet with jazz fusion electric bassist Jeff Berlin and also with Fred Miller on English horn, in trio with Berlin and drummer Bob Moses, with the great Belgian jazz harmonicist Toots Thielemans, Barretto on congas and singer Mary Eiland.