Pascal Marzan & Roger Smith: Two Spanish Guitars

The resulting music displays a wide range of moods and techniques, although each piece has a consistency to it. Marzan and Smith seem (somehow) to know where they are going throughout, and do not get waylaid or distracted. Although obviously improvised, each piece has a beginning, middle and end, rather than feeling as if the players have been pulled hither and thither. At one extreme, both players simply delight in employing the ringing resonant tones of their nylon-strung guitars, as displayed on "Holiday in my head—part 1," allowing sufficient time and space for each of their notes to ring and decay. At the other extreme, they explore a range of extended techniques. "Holiday in my head—part 3" features prolonged sounds like brushing and popping. Ultimately, the differing techniques are integrated together successfully. The three part suite has a coherence that belies the contrasting sounds.

Pairings of acoustic guitars are comparatively rare, but all the more so when they are freely improvising. The last comparable release I can recall is Acoustic Guitar Trio (Incus, 2001); fittingly, the current pairing came about when Smith was invited to Paris in 2006 to play at a concert in honor of Derek Bailey. Bailey himself would doubtless have appreciated this music, and recognized his own influence on it. He would also applaud the fact that these are home recordings (with occasional extraneous noise which detracts from the music not one jot) that radiate the pair's pleasure in playing together. The intimacy of this music makes one feel like an eavesdropper, privileged to be allowed to listen in and share that pleasure.

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