Preston Reed &
Arild Andersen, Tron Theatre, Glasgow **** (four
stars)
A chance remark to a friend by the Girvan-based American
guitarist Preston Reed, that he fancied working with a bass
player, led to him sharing the stage with one of the world's
great double bassists, Arild Andersen.
Until last Wednesday they'd never
met. Now they're talking about reconvening
annually. This, the third gig in their brief testing of
the waters, was purely a beginning. While Andersen has
worked with a modern jazz who's who, including guitarists
Pat Metheny, John Scofield and John Abercrombie, Reed has
spent almost his entire career playing solo, developing a
unique style in which the guitar becomes a piano, a drum and
several shades of exotic percussion.
His
compositions are, by nature, self-contained, requiring
Andersen to use his ingenuity to find a space underneath the
guitar patterns, bowing whale song sounds above them or,
sometimes, just charging straight into them with his
trademark combination of apparently motorised propulsion and
brilliantly intricate invention.
With
Andersen adding Norwegian folk dance tunes and both Nordic
and Spanish impressionism to Reed's idiosyncratic
finger-busters, Appalachian two-steps, jazz ballads and
blues, the repertoire was nothing if not varied.
What's
really required is music that both have written
specifically, rather than adapted, for the duo. But if
there were moments of slight confusion or where Andersen was
content to lay out and let Reed's express train through,
these were outweighed by the magic of hearing the pairing
click. Just listening to Andersen's bass purr and his
melodic lines sing is treat enough, but the sight and sound
of them clearly enjoying the experience turned this
virtuosi's trial run into a collector's
item.