Marc Copland/ John Abercrombie

Speak to Me Pirouet****

Despite a musical and personal friendship going back decades, this lyrical encounter between pianist Marc Copland and guitarist John Abercrombie is their first duo recording. It's an exceptional pairing, binding the guitarist, who draws on a well of melodic inspiration that never seems to run dry, with a player whose acute, subtly equivocal harmonic sense intimately shapes and colours his own linear thinking – and by extension impacts on his partner's. The instinctive differences between two such strong musical personalities, as much as their mutual inspiration, are what nourish these performances to create the emotionally complex and eloquent beauty of such pieces as Left Behind, So Long, Witchcraftand Falling Again(where the solos seem to emerge as if already completely formed) and Copland's delicately subversive Talking Blues. Sheer elegance. see pirouet.com