Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn

While her husband Béla Fleck has been busily recording with African musicians, Abigail Washburn has forged a productive collaboration with the Chinese singer and guzheng player Wu Fei. The fusion of two very different folk traditions seems natural and unforced, perhaps because both have lived inside each other's cultures. Washburn learned Chinese music while staying in Chengdu in the 90s and has toured China several times since. After a classical training at a Chinese conservatoire, Fei studied in California before pitching up on Washburn's porch as a neighbour in Nashville.

Empathetically produced by Fleck, the duo's debut album introduces bluegrass to traditional Chinese folk song, ‘from the hills of Appalachia to the prairies of Xinjian province’ as the liner notes say. Across ten tracks Washburn's banjo and Fei's zither create plangent layers of interwoven stringed magic – one instrumental is even titled ‘Weaving Medley’. Yet the keening congruence of their two voices is every bit as beguiling, heard at its most transcendent on ‘Water is Wide/Wusuli Boat Song’, on which a traditional Scottish tune flows seamlessly into a Manchurian folk song. ‘Who Says Women Aren't as Good as Men’ reinvents a number from a 1950s Chinese opera written in support of the troops in the Korean war. Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn is gorgeous music to get us through hard times.