Inside Voice / Outside Voice

Bassist Michael Bisio (Matthew Shipp, Kirk Knuffke, Whit Dickey) and guitarist / singer Timothy Hill have released a very idiosyncratic disc with equal parts ballads from the Great American Songbook (For All We Know, I Fall in Love To Easily), classics of the edges of modern jazz (Coltrane's Wise One, Ornette's Law Years, Henry Grimes's For Django) and duet improvisations (Hearsay, Transfigure). Each of these angles has merit. The ballads show a gentle and lyrical side of Bisio that I hadn't remembered, while the improv pieces exhibit a lot of skill with extended technique. In several pieces (Wise One, For Django) Hill exhibits his unreal capability for harmonic singing (also known as overtone singing, or throat singing). If you unfamiliar with this technique, it is a very sophisticated technical way of creating vocal overtones that whistle and hum along with the singing. Give this a listen.