Marc Johnson's Bass Desires

Second Sight is the second album by Marc Johnson's Bass Desires, the quartet in which the bassist set two very different guitarists side by side, Bill Frisell and John Scofield. Johnson said the debut "was really about the two guitarists". Here the band works as a real group: every member brings material, and the interplay is more refined, drawing on soul, blues, country and pop as well as jazz.

Johnson, who had played in Bill Evans's last trio, built the band around the two guitarists and drummer Peter Erskine. The first album, Bass Desires, had been recorded at the Power Station in New York in May 1985, with Frisell also on guitar synthesizer, and released in 1986. Second Sight was made in March 1987 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering and Manfred Eicher producing, and released in October 1987. Johnson wrote three of the eight pieces, Frisell and Scofield two each, and Erskine contributed Sweet Soul. The two guitar voices stay easy to tell apart, Scofield's bluesy, Frisell's more atmospheric, and much of the album lives in the space between them.

The opener, Johnson's Crossing The Corpus Callosum, starts like a studio jam, with Scofield's blues giving way to an eerie ambient passage from Frisell over Erskine and Johnson. Scofield's Twister is an affectionate nod to surf guitar, with funky bass and guitar interplay and a short drum solo. Frisell's 1951 recalls the angular melodies of Thelonious Monk.

According to Matt Phillips, the album was considered something of a disappointment on its first release. Tyran Grillo, on ECM Reviews, found it less wild than the debut, though still enthralling. Both writers single out the two guitarists. Grillo called Frisell "downright glowing" on 1951. Phillips, writing on Moving the River in 2015, rated it above Bass Desires and noted how controlled Erskine's drumming is here.

This CD (ECM 1351) was issued in 2008 in the first wave of Touchstones, the series in which ECM reissues catalogue albums in card sleeves. That first wave comprised 40 albums, and the debut Bass Desires had appeared in it a month earlier. Second Sight was first released in 1987.