039: James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg - All Gist Could Be Yours
"That All Gist was made at all...is a small wonder," so we're told in the introduction to the third album of duets from James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg. And it's hard to argue with such a statement, these ten eminently pretty songs pulled together from just two three-day sessions the pair spent together, one in early Winter, and one in late Winter, both in Chicago.
Perhaps then it's the necessity, the immediacy of the conjuring that binds the whole thing together with such effortlessness. It exists as it is because there was simply no other way for it to be.
It begins with a song the pair made from scratch in just forty-minutes and ends with a cover of Neneh Cherry's 'Buffalo Stance' - or at least an inspired dissection of it. The rest of the journey is equally absorbing, the pair's guitar parts drifting both apart and together, always finding their way back no matter how far they go down their own path.
There are occasional flourishes of additional sounds, short guest turns that bring bass, woodwind, and more into the light, but the predominant sound is that of two players, side by side, or across a table at least, constructing magic from the ether; a folksy tale of fun and friendship that lingers in the quiet long after when life, alas, carries right on as it did before.
All Gist is out now, via the excellent Paradise of Bachelors
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