Echo in the Valley

Although they've been married since 2009, Béla Fleck, the world's premier banjo player, and clawhammer banjo player and singer Abigail Washburn maintained strictly separate and highly successful solo careers until two years ago, when the logistical demands of raising a young family led them to do the sensible thing and pool their talents. Their self-titled debut album as a duo promptly won a Grammy as best folk album and the follow-up is steeped in a similarly intimate, back-porch aesthetic it's a set of stripped-down, intense songs. Fleck takes the lead instrumentally but Washburn is an adept player too and, between them, they play a total of seven different banjos, including a banjo ukulele and a restored 1905 upright banjo bass. The interplay between them is at its finest on the traditional Appalachian tunes ‘Sally in the Garden’ and ‘Molly Put the Kettle On’ and a version of Fleck's famous opus ‘Big Country’; it is breathtaking in its virtuosity. On the haunting, rural blues of ‘My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains' and ‘Come All You Coal Miners’, the banjos provide atmospheric accompaniment as Washburn's high, keening voice takes the spotlight. Exquisite from the first pluck to the last.