Since his arrival on the jazz scene, Karachi-born, California-based guitarist Rez Abbasi has made excellent music as a bandleader, but also been an adventurous collaborator, above all with Rudresh Mahanthappa in the thrilling Indo-Pak Coalition.

This new project with sitarist Josh Feinberg, also a jazz bassist who studied with Dave Holland, is another feather in Abassi's creative cap.

It is fascinating to hear the vivid contrast between the two frontline instruments, whose exponents make the point that the sitar is anything but a strange guitar. When Abbasi and Feinberg play unison lines the former's six-string, with its steely tone and tough attack, simply emphasises the the glistening caress of the latter's sitar, which, by the way, also delivers driving aggression on high tempo numbers.

The presence of Jennifer Vincent's five-string cello and Stomu Takeishi's unconventional drum set also makes the ensemble sound alternately light and dense, and although every player is no slouch in terms of technique they come together in a quartet that exercises nailed-on constraint as well as off the hook virtuosity. As much as the line up may, on paper, raise an expectation of ‘Indo-jazz’ the reality is more stylistically broad, and most pleasing of all is the seamless way the material moves into the kind of folk-rock and pop territory that reminds us that the gentle hook of ‘Norwegian Wood’ is not at all incompatible with the wilder thrash of ‘Mathar.’ A stimulating release from a band that brings Asian and western music together with an originality far from standard East-West encounters.