Small Town presents guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan in a programme of duets, recorded live at the Village Vanguard in New York during a week-long engagement in March 2016. It was their first recorded duo session. Frisell made his debut as a leader for ECM in 1983 with the similarly intimate In Line.
Morgan had become a familiar name at ECM as the bassist of choice for Tomasz Stanko, Jakob Bro, David Virelles, Giovanni Guidi and Masabumi Kikuchi. He had already played in Frisell's quartet on When You Wish Upon a Star, released on Okeh in 2016. The set was produced by Manfred Eicher and mixed at Avatar Studios in December 2016 by James Farber, Eicher and the two musicians. Further material from the same Vanguard run appeared later on Epistrophy.
The album opens with an eleven-minute reading of It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago, by Paul Motian. Frisell often played the tune with Motian at the Vanguard. Their cooperative trio with Joe Lovano made several ECM albums, ending with Time and Time Again in 2007. The duo's counterpoint there is hushed, built on bell-like harmonics and quiet electronics. Subconscious Lee salutes Lee Konitz, who was in the audience that night, and Song for Andrew No. 1 is dedicated to the drummer Andrew Cyrille. The title track is a wistful country tune that drifts into shifting dissonance. The set closes with a pared-down version of John Barry's James Bond theme Goldfinger. Along the way come Wildwood Flower, a nod to Maybelle Carter, Fats Domino's What a Party and the duo's joint piece Poet – Pearl.
In The Guardian (2017), John Fordham described an "almost psychically empathic duo set", in which Morgan's quick anticipations of Frisell's moves give the conversations a startling lift. Thom Jurek of AllMusic heard Morgan as "a deeply intuitive player with a glorious earthy, woody tone", one who anchors Frisell's more speculative tendencies. Jeff Tamarkin of JazzTimes found Morgan understated and never in the way.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2525, first released on 26 May 2017, with a 16-page booklet.
