Stuart Masters & Rishi Ranjan
Album: Agam
Label: Hi4Head
Tracks: 7
Website: http://www.stuartmasters.co.uk

Stuart's a well-respected member of the guitarist community, touring with The Fingerstyle Collective throughout the past year, while Rishi is a noted exponent of the sarod and rebab within the Indian classical tradition. They met by chance at a music shop, and quickly found common musical ground, taking the decision to record together an exploration of the musics of their respective traditions, helped enormously by the fact that Stuart's own guitar playing style is already much influenced by Indian and Arabic modalities. Agam, the resulting recording, presents a half-hour sequence comprising seven pieces, composed either by the two musicians themselves or arranged from traditional material or from themes or compositions by the late sarod maestro Bade Baba Allaudin Khan.

Inevitably, Stuart and Rishi audibly pay their respects to other cross-cultural collaborations; however, they're also striving to find their own place, so to speak, and in this regard I don't feel they entirely succeed. For, expert though their musicianship is, and appealing and accessible though each individual item on the disc is, the pieces fall between the cracks somewhat, with neither the musical or structural development or discipline of Indian classical music nor the programmatic interest of pure mood music.

The empathy between the two musicians is clear, and there's some delightful interplay between their instrumental parts, while they benefit from rhythm accompaniment by Mani Singh (tabla) and Dave Engel (percussion). Most of the tracks involve some form of duetting between sarod and guitar, with rebab and violin only appearing on the final one-minute fragment From Maihar. Which points up the disc's deficiency, that there simply isn't sufficient thematic development to sustain interest (even the eight-minute title track is episodic rather than developmental), and three of the pieces are little more than sketches. Not wishing to sound uncharitable, but this musical collaboration just doesn't push the envelope terribly much, pleasant though it will probably be for the less musically adventurous listener.

David Kidman