Eclectic Fingerstylists James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg Blend Seamlessly on ‘All Gist’
What originally brought James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg together was the fact that Elkington’s wife has been one of Salsburg’s best friends for decades. But once the two guitarists met, in the mid-2000s, they soon realized that what they had in common went beyond that interpersonal connection, particularly when it came to music. They bonded over their shared love of indie rock, minimalist composers, American folk, and, perhaps most significantly, the British fingerstyle tradition embodied by players like Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy, and John Renbourn.
About three years into their friendship, Elkington and Salsburg started discussing the possibility of playing together as an acoustic duo. This was easier to envision than to achieve, however, as Salsburg’s family is in Louisville, Kentucky, and Elkington’s is in Chicago (though he was born and raised in England). Also, they have busy careers of their own. Salsburg is a prolific solo artist—he’s collaborated with Joan Shelley (now his wife) and Will Oldham, among many others—and for nearly 25 years he’s been the curator of legendary folklorist/song collector/
producer Alan Lomax’s archive. Elkington has worked with Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, and Steve Gunn, in addition to putting out three albums under his own name.
Hear Elkington and Salsburg on The Acoustic Guitar Podcast Here.
Still, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and Elkington and Salsburg did eventually come together to make their ear-grabbing first disc as a twosome, Avos, in 2011. It was followed four years later by the even more impressive Ambsace. Now, nearly a decade on, they’ve returned to duty with their finest work yet, All Gist (Paradise of Bachelors). Like its predecessors, it showcases the guitarists’ beautifully simpatico interplay and sophisticated compositional styles, as well as their eclectic tastes. The album closes with a drastic rearrangement of Neneh Cherry’s 1988 dance-club classic “Buffalo Stance,” which takes its place in the Elkington/Salsburg catalog alongside previous—and similarly creative—interpretations of Duke Ellington and the Smiths.
On a long, jovial Zoom call, Elkington and Salsburg spoke to Acoustic Guitar from their respective homes about the nuts and bolts of their work as a duo.
You started off as friends. What tipped the balance to turn you into musical collaborators as well?
James Elkington: We had like three years of sitting in pubs talking about doing it before we did it. Motivation has been sorely lacking in this organization from the get-go.
Nathan Salsburg: [Laughs] The original motivation for making that first record is totally obscure to me beyond the most general sense of “Oh, it’d be fun to play together.” I know that there were steps taken. I had to come to Chicago. I had to learn pieces and work out parts. But it’s all lost in the mists of time at this point.
Well, it must have been a pleasant enough experience the first time, since you chose to do it again.
Salsburg: Yes. You know, you hear about people who absolutely loathe each other but still play music together, and they’re obviously biting their tongues and trying to hold it together to make money. It’s all due to Mammon’s influence. But Jim and I play music primarily because we just like being around each other. So the records have been good excuses for us to spend time together.
Then why did nine years pass between Ambsace and All Gist? I’m guessing the pandemic had something to do with it.
Elkington: We have excellent excuses for not making more music. The pandemic was a good one, but I wouldn’t even put it near the top of the list. We’ve both been really productive since the last record, just not in the direction of the duo. And this has been noted by our wives, who kept suggesting that we get back together. The thing is, now that we have kids and less time to see each other, we have a choice to make: whether to try and make some music or just enjoy each other’s company and take our kids to the park—and [the latter] was winning out for the longest time.
But what was encouraging was that when we did start playing again, the way that we work immediately came back. I didn’t know that we’d established such a quick, reciprocal way of working: an “Oh, if you’re gonna do this, then I’m gonna do this” kind of thing. Some people don’t like being in those patterns, and it can make a lot of bands stale. But we do it so rarely that it was inspiring. Things moved fast.
Do you work on arrangements together or separately?
Salsburg: What’s always been a crucial element is the initial individual solo processing that happens before we get together. Because I live in Louisville and he’s in Chicago, he would send me demos and I would send him demos, and we would try to at least figure out capo positions and, in my case, what tuning to use. As I’ve gotten older and wiser, three records in, I’ve learned to not diversify the tunings as much as I might be inclined to. Keep it super simple, so if we play these songs live, it’s not like, “Hold on, gotta tune again” after every song. Double dropped D and DADEAD are the only two tunings I used on this record.
Elkington: I’ve done some writing in DADGAD, but I can barely get my head around standard tuning [laughs]. Because we record here in my attic, there’s a time issue, so we tend to [separately] get in the ballpark [with parts for new compositions]. That way, when we get together, we can just start playing. Then we start picking it apart and saying what we like and don’t like. And, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were doing that.” That’s a big one: “How long have you been playing it like that?”
Then, almost the second that we have an arrangement we can live with, we start trying to record it. And the second we have a take that doesn’t have any massively glaring errors in it, it’s done. For the first time, we’re in a position to sit back and listen to it objectively—or somewhat objectively—without having to be playing it at the same time. That’s when things become more apparent and we’re like, “Oh, we should have done this differently.” Then we’ll either rerecord it or edit it into the shape that now presents itself.
Inevitably with us, because we’re both into repetitive drone-y music, there will be a point in some of the songs where we’re just like, “I could listen to this all day. I wouldn’t mind if this was the whole album, just these four chords.” And then, because we know how much of that we can put up with, we try to scale it back for regular listeners.
Salsburg: Jim is exactly right. I’ve always liked minimal music, drone music, repetitive music. I didn’t always feel comfortable playing or composing it. I was and I remain not excited by what is called American primitive guitar, even though we get lumped in with that. I really don’t like the use of a solo six-string guitar as a drone instrument per se. And I know that “drone” isn’t necessarily the most apt descriptor for American primitive, but the endlessly alternating thumb thing just makes me want to tear my hair out, and I don’t think it works.
So I tried to position myself compositionally somewhere outside that world when I first started releasing music. But over the years, I’ve found myself being more inclined toward it, and I felt more comfortable bringing that sort of repetitive guitar playing to the duo work. I love what Jim does on my repetitive parts, because he starts with a harmony, and it tends to elaborate as it goes on over the course of a minute. The parts change. Sometimes the tempo changes. The accents change.
Elkington: When we started out [as a duo], I was very nervous about it. It seemed like a very exposed way of working, and I was pushing Nathan to make the songs shorter and have more changes and get out as quick as possible. He’d be like, “I think we can hang out in this zone for a while,” and I’d be like, “No, we can’t.” [Laughs]
The potential for embarrassment was too great.
Elkington: Yeah, exactly. I wanted to be in and out in two minutes. But now we’ve gotten to a point where we can just trust the process and not worry about it. We do have the luxury of time, and we don’t have to put out anything we don’t like. We can sit and think about it for a while.
“Buffalo Stance”Had you been thinking for years that “Buffalo Stance” could be a good piece for acoustic guitars?
Salsburg: Not at all. My kid was a year and change, and for some reason it occurred to me to play it for her. I hadn’t heard it in many, many years. The rapping parts are fun and goofy, but the melody of a lot of those riffs is really compelling. And I was like, “Dang, this is fantastic.” So I said to Jim that we should cover “Buffalo Stance,” because I knew that he at least would be intrigued by the challenge.
Elkington: I do love that song. It was a big hit with my people.
Salsburg: Well, initially he said, “No, let’s do this other song on [Neneh Cherry’s debut album] Raw Like Sushi, ‘Manchild.’”
Elkington: It’s got like 50 chords in it. It’s a chord farm.
Salsburg: No one knows it, and it would have been so hard. But within a couple of weeks, Jim put together a rudimentary arrangement of “Buffalo Stance” and sent it to me, and I was over the moon.
Elkington: What I’d say to anyone who wants to arrange a piece of popular music for acoustic guitar is: Don’t just listen to the melody. If you can’t quite play the top line and accompany yourself, there’s always other stuff going on in the arrangement that you can do. You get to decide—no one can tell you what your arrangement is going to be. Just use the bits you like best.
To assist those listening to All Gist, is it Nathan in the right stereo channel and James in the left, or vice versa? Or is the formula that simple?
Elkington: No, no, no. It does change around, depending on what else is happening in the mix or who might be taking the lead. And because of the process I was telling you about, which is quite quick, we usually make decisions, record it, and then don’t play it for a year and a half. So when we come back to it, we’re as mystified as everyone else. I would say if it sounds clunky and mis-fretted, it’s probably me. And if it has a gossamer smoothness to it, an elfin elegance, then it’s Nathan. [General laughter]
You mentioned playing live. Has the duo ever done that?
Salsburg: Not very much. The last time we played any of this material was in October 2015. We did a tour that was maybe six shows. But there is the possibility of a tour this fall.
Will you have two guitar techs if you go on the road?
Elkington: Nathan, what I’m imagining now is two guys driving a truck full of guitars from place to place so that you and I can just fly by ourselves.
What They Play“A lot of people in guitar duos want two distinct voices,” James Elkington notes, “but we like the idea of a single guitar that has 12 strings and is being played with 20 fingers.” To that end, he and Nathan Salsburg chose similar-sounding acoustics for the recording of All Gist. Elkington went with a Santa Cruz OM, while Salsburg opted for a Bourgeois Jumbo OM and a Pleinview Looky Loo. Both guitarists string their instruments with D’Addario Phosphor Bronze True Medium (.013–.056) sets. And, in a holdover from his younger banjo-playing days, Elkington uses thumbpicks, of which he has no preferred brand. —MR
