Sleep With One Eye Open

One wag once described bluegrass music as ‘bebop for the harmonically challenged.’ If there's any truth to this rather snooty musicians’ quip, then Chris Thile and Michael Daves would be bluegrass’ Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. On mandolin and acoustic guitar, they cram every conceivable note (and a fair few inconceivable ones too) into dizzying runs. They turn standard bluegrass hot licks into molten lava without breaking a sweat. Not bad for two guys playing and singing, with no overdubs, into just one mic.

‘20/20 Vision’ is a beefy monster of a bluegrass tussle, with its harmonising twin riffs sounding surprisingly like prime Led Zeppelin. Their courtly pace on Bill Monroe's ‘Mississippi Waltz’ prompts a gentlemanly tremolo from Thile's mandolin. Another instrumental, the traditional ‘Billy in the Lowground’, also offers something distinctive, being an elbows-out knees-up in Western swing mode, on which Daves’ guitar has clearly nicked several Gitanes from Django Reinhardt's packet. That said, 16 tracks is probably six too many, even when the musicians are as inventive as these two. Their version of the bluegrass chestnut ‘Roll in my Sweet Baby's Arms’ would sound joyous if it had been the opening track, but as the 13th it sounds just a little like more of the same. Still, these performances are by and large the most satisfying Thile has ever made because they're free of that selfindulgence which often afflicts people able to play anything you could ever want to play (extremely fast).