#finger picking

Elkington and Salsburg pick up their musical conversation after a long hiatus. Ambsace, their last collaboration, came out in 2015. But like the best reunions, this one is free of awkwardness. They treat each other with warmth and respect throughout. The guitars tangle but never step on one another, each player leaving space for the other.

The pair also makes judicious use of other talent to bolster and deepen their sound. The opener “Death Wishes to Kill” gets a firm grounding from Nick Macri’s acoustic bass; he lends a steadiness to this playful tag in thumps that resonate and mark time without staking too prominent a place for themselves in the sonic mix. But even more striking is the wild skirl of violin that Wanees Zarour adds, wheeling around the guitar line in a throaty emotional timbre. Zarour played on the last Elkington/Salsburg disc. He is a Palestinian-American multi-instrumentalist and academic who teaches at the University of Chicago.

“Nicest Distinction” shows how the foundation that Elkington and Salsburg lay down can be opened up and expanded.  It begins in stately ritual, a madrigal with a little blues introduced in the way the phrases end with a vibrating bent notes.  It’s just the two of them for a good long while, one strumming splayed chords, the other picking a melodic path in and among the meditations. Yet this long piece kicks into a gallop towards the end, with wild tom-tom fill and woodwinds played by Wednesday Knudsen.

All Gist will likely be lumped into the folk category, being acoustic and not quite modern. Still there is really only one actual folk tune on it, the mortality-shaded frolic of “Rule Bretagne,” based, per the title, on the music of seagoing France. Well, maybe not. “Explanation Point” digs pretty deep into country blues, the notes sliding and tumbling down a sunlight rambling path. Here, as elsewhere, melodic lines zing off each other then carom back for a moment of concord.

But really, the most interesting cuts veer the furthest from conventional folk. “Well, Well Cornelius,” originally written for piano by the British composer Howard Skelton, offers a radiant procession of chords framed by the regular architecture of picking. It is serene and unhurried and really quite beautiful. So, is “Buffalo Stance” a Neneh Cherry song you might remember for its pop-locking hip hop beat and strobe lit video. These artists distill it down to melody—a tune you might not have focused on the original, very different version—and transform the cut into a gentle, bucolic ramble. Ironically, in the video, Neneh introduces her song with an aside of “how melodic” which feels like sarcasm, but these two guitarists heard it there all along. Just lovely.