Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant – Swinging On The Strings: The Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant Collection, Vol. 2

This swell 20-track collection opens with “Frettin’ Fingers”, an instrumental hot rod that features electric guitarist Jimmy Bryant starting things up like some long lost Dick Dale cut, then flooring it through an impossibly breakneck, whirling-dervish, how-does-he-do-that melody that’s damn near klezmerish. Bryant’s impossibly fast riffs and runs on “Frettin’ Fingers” must move about as fast as human digits are able, yet they never once forget that it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

In fact, the music on this disc — a sequel to Stratosphere Boogie: The Flaming Guitars Of Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant — suggests that Bryant, not West, should’ve been nicknamed Speedy. Though Bryant is equally thrilling on shuffles, strolls and boogie-woogies, his game here is usually speed, the more the better, and he gets up to speed repeatedly, without once sacrificing any clarity of tone, rhythm, melody or emotion.

Bryant gets going particularly fast on “Frettin’ Fingers” and remarkable country-jazz workouts such as “Two Of A Kind” and “Jammin’ With Jimmy”. Nothing, though, can compare to “China Boy”, a six-minute wind sprint where Bryant just keeps going faster and faster and faster as his Hometown Band partners race to keep up. According to liner-notes fixture Rich Kienzle, the cut was “a giant middle finger aimed at” producer Ken Nelson, specifically, and Capitol Records, generally, for not extending his contract.

Lick for hot lick, pedal steel legend Speedy West was his partner’s complete artistic equal; you have only to hear his jaw-dropping work behind Tennessee Ernie Ford, for example, to know that. On the pair’s duet work, however, Bryant occasionally comes off as the less interesting of the two, going for cartoony sound effects that remain technically stunning but often lack any real emotional punch. Throughout Swingin’ Strings, West shows, amazingly, how he can mimic pinball machines and B-movie flying saucers, impersonate fowl, produce spookhouse noise effects, and even make that stretchy Loony Toons rubberband sound — and, mind you, swingin’ it all the while.

The ballads, on the other hand, find Bryant not only impressing listeners but moving them. The peaceful and breezy “West To Samoa” will transport you to a tropical paradise, and the weeping “Deep Water” could leave you drowning in your own tears. Not exactly the sort of picking alluded to by the “Flaming Guitars” nickname, but a fire that burns a deep blue nonetheless.