Jin Jin/Firefly

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Takashi Hirayasu sprung to fame - well, kind of - as lead guitarist with Shoukichi Kina's Champloose, a giddyingly vivacious group who happily mashed up their homeland's Okinawan folk music with surf music, rhythm and blues, African highlife... whatever came to hand, really. While he left the group some years ago, fed up with the whole rock and roll rigmarole, the career path Takashi's trodden since has shown similar eclecticist tendencies. American slide guitarist Bob Brozman, meanwhile, is another resolute genre-hopper. A guitarist from the tender age of five who's widely considered to be the world's leading practitioner on the national steel guitar, he's also an accomplished Hawaiian slack key player, a respected musicologist and educator and an intrepid musical anthropologist who's made a career of finding forgotten musics on isolated islands ('I'm dealing with islands of less than 100 miles in diameter. They were never empire builders…their priorities are slightly different than mainlanders'). So if a collaboration between these two virtuoso folk musicians seems unlikely on the surface, there are in fact many reasons why it should work. And it does. The two got together, appropriately, on what is apparently the most unspoiled of Okinawa's Ryukyu islands, Taketomi, and improvised a recording studio in a tiny, traditional wooden house. Cocooned here, a lightyear from the 20th century, they then recorded a bunch of Okinawan songs, arrangements emerging organically as Takashi taught Brozman the songs. The results are spellbinding. Takashi has a rousing, raspy singing style ideally suited to the exuberant songs. In the meantime, the trademark chugga-chugg Okinawan rhythms and sinewy melodies Takashi plucks out on the three-stringed sanshin provide the perfect foil to Brozman's effortless, soaring slide. It's a pleasure to hear two players so obviously having the time of their life.