It's not the camera, but who's behind the camera

Tony Gaye – An award winning photographer, his work is found in many permanent collections, including the prestigious International Museum of Photography at The George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, and Graphis in Zurich.

Tony was the first studio photographer to introduce high-resolution digital photography to the Philadelphia market in 1991. A Vietnam veteran and musician, he holds an MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and is a member of the faculty at the Art Institute of Philadelphia. A specialist in commercial and location photography.

His hundreds of clients have included Martin Guitars, Winterthur Museum, Hewlett Packard, Anheuser Busch, Johnson & Johnson, Campbell Soup, Coca Cola, Crayola, Glaxo Smith Kline, Hershey, McDonalds, Panasonic and Sunoco. He is currently shooting on the PBS Production, "The Soundtrack Of Our Lives", the history of recorded music, that is scheduled to air in the Fall season 2010.

Tony is working on a multimedia book about Savor, and Cuban Harely riders called Harlistas, due this fall.

Tony has lived and worked on five continents. www.tonygaye.com

¡Viva Street Music¡

“It’s a naturally happy place, and people are generally joyous there,” Havana-born Víctor Alvarez, Savor’s bandleader, says. “The island is such a paradise, with the sea, the flowers. Music in Cuba is in the streets.”Hearing Savor play is like being handed a gift. This is traditional Cuban music, straight from Havana’s fabled streets.

Alvarez’ mother taught him much of what he knows about music, but he was also educated by his childhood neighborhood. It helped that he lived two doors down from the legendary La Bodeguita del Medio, where well-known musicians were known to mingle with the likes of a guy named Ernest Hemingway. Inevitably, the musicians would pick up their instruments.

“They’d sit and play and I’d go down there and listen from the outside, memorizing the songs and ripping off their licks,” Alvarez says. “A lot of the licks I play today are from those days, from listening to those musicians.” Continue