Larry Coryell - Two for the Road

All Music Guide

On the road as an acoustic duo intermittently between gaps in the schedules of their respective ultrahip fusion bands, Larry Coryell and Steve Khan managed to record several shows and then panned the tape stream to find the nuggets for posterity. There are choices that might have been made out of the fashions of the day, such as the version of Chick Corea's "Spain" that opens the album's first side. Thankfully there are also selections that are here because both guitarists must have realized they were playing magnificently.Coryell's flair for Wayne Shorter extends beyond simply mastering the tunes to conceptualizing unique guitar settings. Parts of"Juju"'s head are pronounced in simple, chiming harmonics, a delightful way of pointing out that these players understand the guitar in its totality, not just the parts of it that can be used to impress speedfreaks. The hot version of "Footprints" doesn't really express the mystery of Shorter's original mood, yet is terrifically in line with ...the Django Reinhardt approach to playing a tune, once again full of the kinds of activities fans of acoustic guitar music will find pleasurable. "St. Gallen" is, in some ways, a remarkable performance. The long introduction sounds like a solo from Coryell, parts of which might be the missing link between him and Derek Bailey. An episode thick with minor seconds and low, throbbing dissonance is only one of many stops on a route that in some ways is as breathtaking as the "milk run" that leaves the St. Gallen station and heads into the Swiss Alps, stopping at farmhouses along the way to pick up fresh dairy shipments. Prior to evoking this image, the piece in its initial moments includes passages of purely showoff rapidity culminating in a lethal swipe at the bridge, the equivalent of a mad critic throwing a knife at a fusion guitarist mid solo stream. Read more Less