My review of Leave the Door Open, the debut from guitarist Joel Harrison and Sarode player Anupam Shobhakar's Multiplicity today at All About Jazz.

If but a single word must describe guitarist/composer Joel Harrison it's restless; one look at his discography, from his "breakthrough" Free Country (ACT, 2003) to the 19-piece big band of Infinite Possibility (Sunnyside, 2013) and it's clear that this Guggenheim Fellowship Award winner isn't content in any one place for long. Leave the Door Open may be his first album of 2014—and yet another departure, this time exploring an improv-heavy kind of world music sourced from the East and West in collaboration with Indian Sarode master Anupam Shobhakar—but there's another album on the horizon that focuses on Harrison the guitarist (Mother Stump, coming on Cuneiform in May), and yet another already in the can, equally different, and looking for a label.

Harrison's work is always collaborative, but other than covering classic songs from the past, more often than not the guitarist is the sole composer. Leave the Door Open is, then, another anomaly in a career filled with them: a recording that splits compositional duties with Shobhakar in a group called Multiplicity, in addition to bringing in some unique interpretations of an old blues standard, one rearranged piece each from the American and Indian traditions, and a collaborative composition from the two leaders. It's a heady brew that doesn't so much find a meeting point where East and West meet as it does blow the door open between the two, allowing the music to seamlessly ebb and flow from and towards both sides, creating something that's the sum total of both but equally reverent to their individual touchstones.

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