Notions & Notations is the debut album of the McGregor-Verdejo Duo, released on 13 November 2026 on Redshift Records. The album celebrates Verdejo and McGregor’s respective heritages through the lens of contemporary music, reflecting their shared passion for discovering, commissioning, and performing new works for flute and guitar. Notions & Notations includes music by Toru Takemitsu, Gabriela Ortiz, Ignacio Baca-Lobera, and Anthony Genge, alongside commissioned works by Alfredo Santa Ana, Hiroki Tsurumoto, Kara Gibbs, and Diego Lozano. The album can be streamed on Bandcamp and, as of November 13 2026, will be available on all major streaming platforms.

The project began in 2019, when Verdejo, a Regina-born Canadian of Mexican heritage, obtained his Mexican citizenship, sparking a conversation with McGregor, who is Japanese Canadian, about their respective heritages and how these might inform their work as performers and curators of new music. What unfolded over the next seven years was a series of discoveries and rediscoveries: a multi-movement work by Gabriela Ortiz rooted in Latin dance rhythms; a formidable “new complexity” warhorse by Ignacio Baca-Lobera; Anthony Genge’s Night Rain, inspired by an 18th-century Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print by Ippitsusai Buncho; and a renewed connection with one of the most important works in the flute and guitar repertoire, Toru Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea.

The program is rounded out by a series of commissions. In Tegami, Kara Gibbs explores the complexities of identity through a setting of a poem by fellow Japanese Canadian Carolyn Nakagawa, performed here with soprano Dory Hayley. Alfredo Santa Ana’s Wave Remote pays tribute to his youth as a rock musician growing up in Mexico City, expanding the flute and guitar sound world with electronics and pedal effects. Hiroki Tsurumoto combines bass flute and guitar with prerecorded sounds of his “barkless” Basenji dogs, creating a sound palette that is at once eerie, humorous, and affectionate. Finally, Mexican composer Diego Lozano closes the album with Notions and Notations, a work that examines the friction between a musical idea (notion) and its representation in a score (notation). The result is four movements of dreamlike sequences, their strangeness heightened by the use of electronics.