Piece Description

Jeff Johnson and Phil Keaggy are musicians from different musical worlds. Jeff Johnson is best known for his Celtic and Persian inflected albums, draped with lush keyboards, sensual rhythms and his melodic writing. Phil Keaggy is known to a bigger slice of the world as a veteran of the psychedelic rock era with the group Glass Harp and a solo career that has embraced rock, country and new age. Among guitarists, especially finger-style players, he's a legend.

But both musicians are united by their born-again Christian backgrounds and that's how they got together at a Laity Lodge meeting on the Frio River in Texas. They've combined to make an album unlike anything either has done, yet it draws from the core of their music. Composed in their separate studios in Nashville and Washington state, Frio Suite is a CD of intricately painted landscapes, much of it inspired by the Frio River and the photography of Kathy Hastings, which adorns the album. She takes macro photos that have a painterly look, making for often surreal, abstract images of real life objects and settings. Johnson and Keaggy create the same sort of detailed, close-up music that draws you into its patterns.

In this edition of Echo Location, host John Diliberto reviews Phil Keaggy and Jeff Johnson’s CD "Frio Suite."