Monday, Dec. 15, 2025 – Sonic Seasonings Classic

Will Ackerman & Friends and the California Guitar Trio play seasonal songs old and new.

In 2009, on a chilly day deep in the hills of southern Vermont, a group of musicians gathered at Will Ackerman’s Imaginary Road Studios to create the sound of Sonic Seasonings. Will Ackerman is best known as the founder of Windham Hill Records. He’s also a fingerstyle guitar player. Will not only founded Windham Hill Records, he’s also released several beautiful acoustic guitar albums over the years and won a Grammy for one of them. For this Sonic Seasonings program, Will gathered a bunch of musicians in his studio near Brattleboro, Vermont. They included pianist Kori Linae Carothers, the duo of Jill Haley and David Cullen, trumpeter Jeff Oster and Violinist Scarlet Rivera. Over the course of 2 days, Will Ackerman and friends performed music for the holiday season, both traditional and new.

We’ll hear that and a 2006 Sonic Seasonings performance from The California Guitar Trio. In that year the trio consisted of three students of Robert Fripp’s Guitar Craft and The League of Crafty Guitarists. Hailing from Japan, America and Belgium, these string pickers are as likely to play the surf hit “Pipeline” as a Bach fugue, or original songs that reveal elements of baroque
counterpoint and African cross-picking. In 2006, they came into the Echoes living room to play a set of seasonal songs, but not your usual songs.