An album which took shape over four years at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, where Nash and Colman are visiting teachers, Ribbons Vol. 1 celebrates a decade-long musical bond that runs deep, an intuitive understanding of each other’s musical sensibilities that lies at the heart of this deeply affecting recording. The duo’s sound-world is a richly layered one, drawing on jazz as its bedrock (with John Taylor and Norma Winstone acting as important aesthetic touchstones) while reaching outward into the introspective terrain of the great singer-songwriters as well as the impressionist beauty of John Ireland and Claude Debussy. Album opener ‘Noble Heart’ brings together a descending five-note melodic hook from Nash, a beautifully expressive vocal from Colman, plus a gorgeous contribution from Iain Ballamy on tenor. The title track, the first song the duo wrote together, is a beguiling meditation on the restless, perhaps eternal human yearning for transcendent meaning (“Here I go again in search of beauty elusive, My spirit demands the impossible. A mystery inside a secret. Wrapped up in unquestionable meaning”). Other highlights include Colman’s ear-catching, stacked up vocal lines at the beginning of ‘Little Light’; the touching ‘Sophie’s Song’ inspired by their Aurora-hunting friend; singer-songwriter Sophie Bancroft (a deft reimagining of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Night Dreamer’), plus the wondrously atmospheric ‘Goodbye’, written by Nash and cast as a piano and bass duet, which serves as an intriguing postlude.
