Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile's tour with music from their recently released self-titled debut duo disc on Nonesuch, takes a week's hiatus before resuming in Raleigh next Wednesday. In the mean time, Chris will be performing with label mate Brad Mehldau at New York's Poisson Rouge on Friday in a concert to benefit the Obama campaign.

Last night at Seattle's Benaroya Hall, Meyer and Thile gave a performance that, writes Tom Keogh in the Seattle Times, "showcased the rigorous yet accessible, and engrossing, experimentation that defines their intermittent partnership." Meyer, with his career's mix of classical, jazz, and folk, "has sought ways to fuse improvisation with formal structure," while Thile, in his work with Punch Brothers, for example, "has been attempting the same thing from another direction."

Keogh recognizes that, "with the new album and tour, Meyer and Thile are realizing the potential of the music they began exploring years ago. Their almost unclassifiable sound at Benaroya refused to lock onto fleeting influences, and they focused primarily on the dynamics of performing together."

He continues:

The show's most exciting moments revealed sudden eruptions of possibility and poetry. The concert began with grey, almost-sunrise tones from the bass, while Thile's mandolin danced steadily around the sound. Abruptly, Meyer opened up, and Thile soon followed. Patterns emerged and then blurred like a stone tossed into a watery reflection.

The concert was such that "the boldness of this duo's performance," Keogh concludes, "will not be easily forgotten."

Read the complete concert review at seattletimes.nwsource.com.

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Over the weekend, the pair played a pair of shows in Oregon—Saturday at the Shedd Institute's Jaqua Concert Hall in Eugene and Sunday at Kaul Auditorium at Reed College in Portland. Reporting from the latter for The Oregonian, James McQuillen, calls the two "masters of their respective instruments unconstrained by considerations of genre." He describes them further: "Both are fixtures in the bluegrass scene, but their collaboration covered a broader territory, a sort of magical never-never land where bluegrass and roots rock meet jazz and classical." Of the songs off the new album in the live set, says McQuillen, "there was a down-home, easygoing sensibility to the music, which tempered their amazing technical and harmonic facility." Read the concert review at oregonlive.com.

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In other Thile news, Chris talks with writer Patrick Goldstein for the Los Angeles Times's "Big Picture" blog about another passion of his: baseball, and, more specifically, The Cubs. Chris finds the juncture where those two interests meet when he describes his favorite player, Ryne Sandberg:

"It really had a huge impact on me as a musician," he says. "When he made his Hall of Fame speech, he said he was never the most naturally gifted player, but he worked as hard as anyone. That applies to anyone playing music. You want to be a team player, not just in performing well under pressure, but by performing in ways that help your band mates. Whether you're an athlete or a musician, there's a danger that you see yourself as being so naturally gifted that you're willing to let the talent do all the work. But the really great ones don't take their talent for granted. They mold their talent into something extraordinary."

Read the full story at latimesblogs.latimes.com.