Mediterranean Sundance

Two guitars in conversation — this is the essential architecture of this landmark recording, with Paco de Lucía and Al Di Meola (or Larry Coryell, depending on the version) trading phrases that wind around each other like vines. De Lucía's flamenco vocabulary collides productively with classical and jazz fingerpicking traditions, and the result is music that feels simultaneously ancient and entirely new. The tempo is mercurial — passages of extraordinary speed give way without warning to something slower and more searching, as if the piece is constantly asking itself a question and then reconsidering the answer. There's a Mediterranean heat to the sound, a dryness and precision in the attack, the strings bright and immediate, nothing cushioned or softened in the production. Emotionally it's exhilarating in the way that watching two athletes perform at the peak of their powers is exhilarating — you're aware of the technical achievement, but what moves you is the conversation happening above and beneath the technique. The piece carries a feeling of late afternoon in southern Spain, sunlight going amber, the temperature finally dropping to bearable. It belongs to a crucial moment in acoustic guitar history when genre walls were dissolving, when flamenco was discovering it could speak to jazz and jazz discovered it had been missing something it couldn't name. Play it loud, in a room where you can sit and do nothing else.