Torsten Goods - Irish Heart (2006) 320kbps

25 year-old guitar-wunderkind Torsten Goods and his new release Irish Heart call out an enthusiastic yes to these questions. Friends of Irish folk music and infectious reels are in for a surprise, and so are fans of Wes Montgomery, Django Reinhardt or Harry Connick Jr. There is more repertoire out there than the Great American Songbook and Goods’ choices give his twenty-something-quartet a chance to shine.

“On Irish Heart I do what I am”, says the Nuremburg-based son of a Northern Irish mother and German father. This sounds self-evident, but there is a longer story. Sure, Torsten was raised on Irish music. The parents held regular living room sessions featuring passionate renditions of ballads and folk songs from the mother’s home. But this didn’t do much for her son. He steered clear of the Dubliners and Chieftains in the parental record collection, and went straight for Oscar Peterson and Duke Ellington. At age 16 he had made up his mind: Jazz it was to be, come what may.

Beauty often lies so close to home. In Torsten Goods case right where his “Irish Heart” beats. It was his mother who taught him to listen to its voice. She is regularly moved to tears by his solo instrumental rendition of the old traditional “The Londonderry Air” that he often played as an encore. Irish Heart is his way of answering the call of his heritage. He does it in style: sensitive, swinging and with a lightning touch, yet perceptive to Northern Ireland’s own troubled history. In the album’s opener Goods’ original “Sweet North” (one of three finger snapping Goods-originals on the album) he admits to being alarmed by the situation in his mother’s country. But he loves this country all the same.