James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg: All Gist

Album Narrative

“Party Zone.”

James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg recently got matching suits. They’re a light dark blue—too light, it turns out, for a funeral, though fine for a wedding, and pretty good for a bar mitzvah. They had a vague hope to get together wearing them, maybe take some pictures for this record, James and Nathan’s third album of guitar duets—and second, following 2014’s Ambsace, with Paradise of Bachelors—but time and place are rarely on their side. Despite their best intentions, and genuine fondness for playing music and generally being together, they rarely get the chance to play music or generally be together, pushing a photo op far down the list of practical priorities. 

That All Gist was made at all, then, is a small wonder. How it was made—in two segments of three days, one in early Winter, one in late Winter, in Chicago—is a testament to James and Nathan’s enthusiasm for the project. As they’d done on their previous two duo records, each brought fragments of varying lengths to the table (literally James and his family’s kitchen table) and, in varying degrees of frenzy, built songs out of them. Some, like “Numb Limbs,” took several intense hours of tinkering, mostly for Nathan to carve sympathetic designs around the knotty edifice James had constructed—thus its title. Others, like “Death Wishes to Kill” (a phrase lifted from a T.F. Powys novel the two had each recently read and loved) took its feverish shape in forty minutes full of shrieks and groans and hysterical laughs hard-stopped by James rushing out, late, to get his son from school. The acceptable window for coffee consumption was pushed to its reasonable limits, and then beyond them, slamming up against a reasonable hour to start drinking beer. 

As with Ambsace, the covers on All Gist outline a Venn diagram of Elkington and Salsburg’s abiding interests. On one end is a faithful arrangement of English composer Howard Skempton’s resplendent “Well, Well, Cornelius” (1999); on the other is a composite of two traditional Breton dance tunes (pieced together from Canadian, Irish, and Breton sources); and in the middle—where else—is a transmutation of Neneh Cherry’s monumental “Buffalo Stance” (1988), a song that no one aside from James and Nathan would ever have thought for a moment could or should be made into fodder for two acoustic guitars. But it was, and with delicacy and joy and sincere reverence for the original, which they painstakingly deconstructed. 

Like Ambsace, All Gist has its share of unadorned duets showcasing the duo’s skill at putting together, and then playing together, a piece of music: the guitars in “Numb Limbs,” “Long in the Tooth Again,” and “Fears of This Nature” support and propel each other like the workings of a well-made if occasionally mistreated watch. You wouldn’t think these guys need any assistance with all this, but they do, and it’s provided by stellar players whose names will be familiar to listeners of James and Nathan’s records, together and apart. Standout bassist Nick Macri returns to lend his great musicality to the majority of songs. The aforementioned “Death Wishes to Kill” features a fiery solo from returning guest, Wanees Zarour, who soars over and through the guitars with customary grace. The three-part ballad “Nicest Distinction” is ornamented with ethereal woodwinds from Pigeons band member and solo explorer Wednesday Knudsen, while “Explanation Point” and (almost) title track, “All Gist Could Be Yours,” add to the duo’s palette with Reich-like layers from Jean Cook on strings and Anna Jacobson on brass. 

All Gist perhaps demonstrates more than anything the precarious balance struck between what the Elkington-Salsburg duo is—exemplified by cramming to compose or remember guitar parts in James’s kitchen—and what the duo could be if it was the engine of a small orchestra in a government-funded arts enclave in some Central European country … where they’d be contractually obliged to perform in matching well-tailored suits.