The title of the penultimate track on Two Tone , the new CD collaboration between guitarist Lewis Winn and the bassist Jon Gagan, is "Decades," which attests to their long-standing and still ongoing musical relationship. Throughout the course of the disc's 10 delicately balanced dialogues, you hear the depth of mutual understanding and respect both these locally-based players have for each other's ideas. In fact, it is often difficult to tell who wrote the album's 10 individual tunes, though Gagan points out that his compositions tend to veer in the direction of simple bluesy statements, while Winn's are "more harmonically complex".

This, however, is not always the case. While the album's opening "Duchess of Walter Street", which Gagan penned in honor of Sophia Peron (Walter Street being the location of The Jazz Inn, the Albuquerque B 'n' B Peron and her husband oversee), is a straight-ahead blues walk, his "Reunion" bears the harmonically sophisticated mark of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.

At certain junctures in Winn's contributions, you'll find richly textured and convoluted lines such as the intricate "Spray" which stands in stark contrast to "Wiggin," with its Jimi Hendrix like intimations.

In the final analysis, it makes little difference who wrote the individual pieces. Rather, it is the sympathetic and symbiotic interaction between Winn's electric guitar and Gagan's upright bass that carry the day and lend Two Tone its overall distinction.