Alex Hamburger & José Luiz Martins - Catalog of Dreams (2026) Hi Res

For the past six years, flutist Alex Hamburger and pianist José Luiz Martins have been the heartbeat of each others’ musical worlds. Now, with their debut record as a duo, the husband and wife create a shared world, offering listeners a highly personal, textural immersion into the sonic catalog of their journey.

The two musical prodigies were originally on divergent paths when they first met in 2018 during coincidental time abroad in Basel, Switzerland. Hamburger, originally from the Washington, D.C. metro area, was living previously in New York City, while Martins was studying for a masters in Basel after leaving his hometown of São Paulo, Brazil. Their first shared notes snapped their lives together, ushering in an instant connection and understanding, both about the music that influenced them and the music they wished to put in the world.

Together, the partners found a deeply rooted shared commitment to using space, listening, and empathetic reaction to dive into the unknown and return with beauty and compassion.

Now living together in Hyattsville, Md., Hamburger and Martins recorded Catalog of Dreams in 2025 as a response to the diverse range of musical traditions that shaped them, both as individuals and as a pair. Six of the album’s eight songs are unique reinterpretations of traditional and modern classics from composers such as Herb Ellis, Wayne Shorter, and Thundercat. The duo then flexes the intimate dynamics and texture of piano, voice, flute, and electronic keyboards to reinterpret the compositions into vehicles for new dreams and possibilities.

Of course, the most noticeable influence on the album is that of Brazilian music, which native Paulistano Martins brought to the record (and the relationship) from the very beginning. Three tunes make this connection explicit: Gilberto Gil’s classic “Ladeira da Preguica” (eternizada pela voz de Elis Regina), Airto Moreira’s eternally groovy “Tombo in 7/4,” and the modern Brazilian heavyweight Luisa Lacerda’s “Poente,” a familial celebration that features lyrics by her father Andre Lacerda.

However, Catalog of Dreams is steeped in Brasiliana beyond these three tunes, with traces of groove, melody, and harmonic complexity saturating the duo’s playing and arrangements throughout. The record’s two original compositions, both composed by Hamburger with production assistance from Martins, achieve this with a tender nuance. By taking these Brazilian influences back into her own roots of great lyrical musical traditions (the Great American Songbook, Black American Music, and folk), Hamburger finds a way to explore themes of loss, trauma, injustice and the human experience with nuance and care.

Although both Hamburger and Martins are prolific on their own, each with their own critically acclaimed body of work as bandleaders, this is their first full length album with just the two of them. With this debut of eight songs in just under thirty minutes, the partners draw us into their journey, into their catalog, and into their dreams.