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The modesty of the title of the first official full-length (although their self-titled 2020 cassette is nearly forty minutes) collaboration between Indian tabla and sitar player Joshua Massad and American guitarist Dylan Aycock belies the depth of music on display. Getting together before Massad moved to India to study under pioneer Indian musician Zakir Hussain, the pair spent a few nights recording spontaneous music together, with Dylan’s brother Jesse adding synth to the second track.
As Bill Meyer neatly puts in his Magnet Magazine review, ‘Joshua Massad and Dylan Aycock have enough study between them to know how far from the formal mark the music on Two Improvisations lands’. This is a key point in the listening experience of the album, as it suggests the freedom the pair may have felt to move in their creative spaces as they saw, without the restrictions of form and tradition.
This feels present from the off, with One starting fairly quickly with a picked tremolo line by Dylan on his twelve string guitar that Joshua responds to with a nippy tabla run. Apparently, Dylan arrived at the house Joshua was staying in to find him deep in practise and set up to play (for the first time together) without any words being exchanged. An eighteen-minute chunk of that session is the first song. It makes for an exhilarating listen, especially knowing each musician was improvising in the purest sense, with no pre-planning involved. The resulting sound is brisk indeed, especially in the first ten minutes, but the spontaneity and energy that comes through, added to the creative freedom of avoiding the musical rule book, means a quite thrilling long-form piece.
Things get even tighter for the last eight minutes of One, with the tempo shifting and the duo seeming to lock into each other’s movements and become even more confident to dart off on different runs and ebb and flow the speed intuitively. Indeed, the drama and tension building in the final stages, from quiet playing to big and fast interactions, is intense and liberating to hear.
Two is a very different beast, with the bendy notes of the sitar, along with the subtle throbbing drones of the synth, just detectable in the background, and metallic percussion giving the piece an eerier air that the tabla’s more natural timbre placates somewhat. In fact, weirdness prevails in part across these sixteen minutes; after six, the pace slows right down to a strange exchange of sitar, scattered percussion and drone that sounds like a dark scene from a sci-fi film. For the final five minutes of the piece, the tempo quickens and notes lower to create a more ominous atmosphere (aided by some barely detectable ghostly swirls) that contradicts certainly the first track, plus much of the second.
It is absolutely fascinating music that is as mercurial as it is rhythmic and steady. Imagine Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s A Meeting by the River with the experimental knob turned right up and you’ll get close. Spellbinding.
Two Improvisations (5 April 2024) Scissor Tail Records.
