Singing Sands

This beautiful guitar and bass duet album is a pure pleasure to listen to from start to finish. And when I say ‘duet’, I mean just that. French fretless maestro Alain Genty is a melodic player of the first order, taking the lead as often as not and supplying no mere underpinning but a collaboration in the truest sense of the word. As for McManus, the brilliant Scottish-born guitarist is in top form, whether he’s playing intricately ornamented fingerpicked versions of Irish and Scottish tunes (both traditional and recently composed), extemporising on a Greek wedding tune or tackling the two Genty originals that appear here – a nifty jig called ‘Le Petit Encrier’ and the meditative closing number ‘Ton Ma Var/Melen Aour’.