For the past six years, flutist Alex Hamburger and pianist Jose 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 Sao 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' (made famous by 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.

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Markus Burger writes of his new release: "Since I was a child, I have loved the outdoors and fell in love with the vast wilderness of Alaska and Iceland. In 2000 I visited Iceland for the first time and wrote most of the songs for my solo piano release Ultreya which came out in 2001 on Jazzline Records. It took me until 2002 to go to Alaska and visit Valdez and the Kenai Peninsula. I was blown away by the beauty of Alaska and the uniqueness of the folks that live there. Through my affiliation with Idyllwild's Jazz Academy director Marshall Hawkins, one of the finest bassists on the West coast and a great Jazz Educator, I was fortunate enough to start teaching for a few semesters in Homer Alaska. In 2015 and 2016 I got to visit Kodiak Island, which left a lifetime impression on me. The songs on this album were written in Alaska over the years of my trips to this wilderness state. When planning this album's recording session, I asked Bob Magnusson to play bass, because we share the love of musical elegance and simplicity- and because I truly love Bob's bass sound (like so many others before me). I have admired Peter Erskine since I first heard him perform with his ECM Trio featuring John Taylor and Palle Danielsson. I love his playing and his compositions and I was thrilled when he agreed to be part of this musical project... Jim Linahon has been the sound wizard behind all of my albums for Challenge Records and he is in my humble opinion one of the finest engineers and producers for Jazz in the U.S. today. He was delighted that Microtech Gefell and DPA send him their fienst microphones to capture every nuance of our trio's playing... "

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