In the true jazz spirit of improvisation, guitarist Samo Salamon has taken the lemon of the COVID lockdown and turned it into a lemonade of a project, starting a multi-volume series of guitar duets with six stringed partners from all over the world, all safely socially distant but still musically compliant.
Two guitar sessions are one of the true comfort foods of music, going back to the days of Eddie Lang/Lonnie Johnson all the way through Joe Pass/John Pisano, Stefan Grossman/John Renbourn, Pat Metheny/Jim Hall and on and on. There’s never enough!
Salamon’s first release has him in the company of various European guitarists ranging from and including Austria, Poland, Greece and Finland, creating a Common Market of guitar moods. The result is as wide ranging as taking a collection of appetizers from a table of each country’s restaurants.
The pieces range from two acoustic guitar sonatas to contrasts with electric strings, mandolin and even a dash of moog tones. The strings snap and the fingers tap on the wood on the energetic “Miss Sarcasm” with Austria’s “Alex Machecek” while a mix of plugged in and acoustic with Finland’s Kalle Kalina gets bluesy and raucous on “Coalition of the Mistaken”. Salamon jabs with Switzerland’s Philipp Schauferlberger on a gloriously quirky “Monk” with the strings bending and snapping like Reese Witherspoon, and you get a mix of rock effects and mandolin with Serbian Dusan Jevtovic on the fervent “Seven Cats”. Lush and pastoral moments are felt with the harplike and flamenco tones of the gentle “Awkwardly Placed” with the Portuguese Andre Fernandes and folk tones get tensile with the Norwegian Jacob Young on the impressionistic “Looking Back”. The wonderful part of the album is that you can get caught up in simply the chiming of the strings as on “Northern Wind” with Greek Spiros Exaras or feel like you’re listening in on an intimate conversation as on the rich “Seagulls in Maine” with the Spaniard Albert Vila.
This first volume is a real treasure, making you impatient for the next cache. Let’s get some touring planned post lockdown!