Guitar and clarinet: now there's a great jazz pairing. Didn't bebop – sort of – come out of Charlie Christian plucking away in Benny Goodman's sextet? Didn't rock'n'roll and Elvis and Jimi Hendrix too? (Please, chin-stroking musical genealogists, no letters. This is just a provocation – not to mention entirely and indisputably true.) Tehran-born duo guitarist Golfam Khayam and clarinettist Mona Matbou Riahi are ploughing a different furrow on their debut release, Narrante, examining the music of their homeland via pathways suggested by their training and playing in the US and Europe. ‘The freshness and purpose of improvisation come mostly from the Persian side, while the careful structure and careful crafting comes from Western contemporary music,’ Khayam explains. ‘Lachrimae’ draws on the improvisational singing traditions of Kurdistan; the enchanting title track derives from a healing ceremony in Baluchistan. ‘What I really love in improvising is the silence between ideas,’ says Matbou Riahi – which explains why the music is such a neat fit for co-producer Manfred Eicher's ECM label. What's particularly lovely here is the manner in which, between those atmospherically pregnant silences, guitar and clarinet reflect one another: the playing is so gently empathetic, the instruments seem to vibrate in sympathy – like Charlie's and Benny's back in the late 1930s/early 1940s, only different. Really quite different.