Jazz
Between The Lines · 2 October 2026
“Ode to Johnny Doran” runs ten minutes three and is the longest piece on “Disambiguation”. Christy Doran starts it alone and leaves a silence between phrases that takes up as much room as the notes: the lines don’t resolve, they hang, and when Imran Khan’s tabla comes in it marks no pulse, it only gives them permission to continue. The record is eight pieces and fifty-one minutes twenty-four, released on 2 October by Between The Lines, with two players and two instruments and nothing else.
Doran was born in Ireland on 21 June 1949 and has been playing for six decades, and what he does here isn’t borrowing Indian music as decoration. On “Continuum V” (five forty-two) the electric guitar opens a clean mid-tempo space where every small decision registers, and the tabla, instead of accompanying, shifts the centre of gravity each time the guitar has fixed it. On “The Day They Came” (seven ten) the same operation turns into play: a guitar figure tilts the floor and Khan rebuilds the balance by inventing a new centre. “Disambiguation”, seven four, opens the record with an open, country-tinged guitar that carries the melody towards a folk music belonging to no particular archive.
The two pieces that step outside the duo are the least convincing. “Taal Pravaah” (three thirty-eight) is the only composition Doran didn’t write and it’s solo tabla: it’s magnificent and it has nothing to do with the conversation the record defends the rest of the time, so it works as a demonstration dropped into a dialogue. And on “Mantra On An Irish Stream” (five fifty-three) the guitar moves into reversals and digital treatments that break the very condition of the rest of the album: two instruments listening to each other with nothing in between.
The close picks the thread back up. “Dark Slender Boy”, five fifty-three, hints at a raga through distortion and stays at the edge without resolving it, and before it “Haute Savoie” (six one) is the most energetic thing here without letting the energy cost it its shape. Fifty-one minutes is a long time for one guitar and one tabla, and the record holds them because it never does the same thing twice.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents