The Strange Travelers is the new album by vanguard contemporary jazz / classical duo: The Salamander Project. There are two reasons that make this musical offering noteworthy: It is both a spontaneous musical celebration of the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, one of the most fascinating figures of the Modern Art period, and a richly varied

The Strange Travelers is the new album by vanguard contemporary jazz / classical duo: The Salamander Project. There are two reasons that make this musical offering noteworthy: It is both a spontaneous musical celebration of the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, one of the most fascinating figures of the Modern Art period, and a richly varied cross-cultural dialogue between two world-class instrumentalists, Nestor Zurita (saxophone) and Augustus Black (piano).

The eighteen pieces on this transatlantic collaboration were recorded in the Victoria Rooms main hall in Bristol, England, and at the main studio of Kayak Records in Miami, Florida, in the United States. The album was mixed, mastered and produced by Augustus Black at Woodshed Project Base (home of Agharta Records), with additional sound design at Holistic Audio-Labs in Japan.

This album takes as its inspiration the strange, dreamlike moods, metaphysical themes and evocations of distant places - the numinous palace of memories - found in the visual imagination of the 20th-century painter De Chirico. He believed art to be a metaphysical portal to other dimensions, and he used his artistís eye to seek out mysteries in the immortal, the enigmatic hidden in the everyday and the commonplace. Through that portal we journey, on wings of music, and find ourselves Strange Travelers in an alternate reality; in the borderlands between the finite known and infinite unknown, where the Blakean imagination becomes a fully functioning visionary human sense; aiding in our journey and our return, bearing music. Across the eighteen performances in this recording, a peculiar gestalt in a subliminal correspondence between visual and musical ideas forms the basis of our approach, through which we hope to capture and deliver some of that secret magic in sound.