Purists might baulk at the Adagio from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez segueing into a wild bossa nova or an electric guitar line running wild through the rapid Bachian figurations of the Allegro solemne from Barrios’s La catedral. But the purity of friendship trumps that of mere convention every time, and so it proves here as classical guitarist Sharon Isbin teams up ‘my guitar heroes, artists that I admire from the classical, rock and jazz worlds, many of whom have been great friends and performing partners’, in repertoire ranging from Rodrigo to rock. Indeed, the only ‘pure’ work on the disc is La catedral, Isbin’s intense performance of which ends the disc (the aforementioned duo version of the work’s Allegro with rock guitarist Steve Vai working the distortion pedal hard comes halfway through the programme); the only other ‘classical’ solo is Segovia’s transcription of Albéniz’s Asturias.

All the works on the disc are ‘inspired by South American and Spanish roots’, so the dominant flavour is Latin. Nevertheless, the programme displays all the diversity of a Brazilian rainforest, both in terms of instrumentation (the nylon string guitars of Isbin and Romero Lubambo; the electric guitars of Steve Vai, Stanley Jordan and Steve Morse; the vocals of Nancy Wilson and Rosa Passos; the soprano sax of Paul Winter; the ‘organic’ percussion of Gaudencio Thiago de Mello) and style (Spanish, Columbian, Argentinian, Brazilian; classical, jazz, rock).

The result is less a paella mixta than a true symphony of hearts and minds built on the cantus firmus of Isbin’s passion for musical friendship.