Water Lily Acoustics: Two by Two

Producer Kavichandran Alexander has built his label, Water Lily Acoustics, on an unusual strategy: take two instrumentalists from different musical traditions, put them together with no rehearsal or preparation, and record them. Alexander likens it to two strangers meeting on a train. They might have an interesting conversation, or a boring one. They might fight. They might fall in love and get married. He's willing to take his chances.

The newest examples mostly reveal the serendipitous results he hopes for. In Christ the King Chapel in Santa Barbara, California, four fine string pickers from England, China, India, and Lebanon take up the challenge on two discs. The unlikely pairing of English folk guitarist Martin Simpson and Wu Man, a virtuoso of the Chinese pipa lute, yields the most magical interactions. Music for the Motherless Child finds two giants mapping out common ground with amazing ease. On five of the six tracks, Simpson sets the agenda with traditional English and Irish tunes, an American banjo number, and a slow blues. His sure-footed acoustic guitar work sounds warm and familiar, but when Wu Man works in intricate improvisations on her high-pitched, thin-toned lute, the familiar quickly turns exotic.

On "A-Minor Blues," Wu Man shows her sensitivity to blues phrasing, sliding and bending pitches on the rubato exposition and resorting to ecstatic tremolo when Simpson settles into a loping waltz feel. It ain't deep blues, but the players engage each other. "White Snow in Spring" lets Wu Man show her stuff in boldly adventurous flights of notes through which Simpson weaves a simple bass line. As elsewhere, the two players get great results from simply matching the rise and fall of each other's dynamics.

Vishwa Mohan Bhatt is the inventor and virtuoso of the mohan vina, a radically altered arch-top slide guitar. When he teams up with Lebanese ud and violin master Simon Shaheen on Saltanah, the fit is tighter than on the Simpson/Wu Man disc, since Indian and Arabic classical music share common aesthetics. But as Alexander's expansive sleeve notes (an experience in themselves) point out, saltanah means "to dominate" or "to govern." If Martin Simpson and Wu Man engage in a cordial symposium, these two go for rhetorical argument -- disciplined, aggressive, and, at its best, exhilarating. Each of these five tracks pairs an Indian raga with an Arab maqam, both words loosely translating as "scale."

Restlessness and rivalry emerge often in these ambitious constructions. A number of pieces adapt the form of an Indian composition -- a slow exposition building to a furious, heartstopping unison ending. But Shaheen, perhaps the more dazzling player by a hair, keeps the emphatic reverie of his own Arab traditions present throughout. The dry, feather-light fluttering of the ud makes a particularly satisfying complement to the liquid, metallic glide of Bhatt's mohan vina. A deep-toned bansuri flute and an additional violin fill out the sound palette on a couple of tracks.

Both Saltanah and Music for the Motherless Child yield the inevitable moments of uncertainty and fishing. But for the most part they offer coherent affirmation of a most risky approach to making music.

-- Banning Eyre