The outstanding impression that one is left with after listening to this album is that it is unmistakably David Ashworth. From the beginning of his career he has remained at a distance from the main currents of his time, developing a distinctly personal style, and always ‘writing in his own voice’, and in this instance, playing in his own style. Hallmarks of his playing style are small, tight string bends; an on/off vibrato used to great expressive effect; and mesmerising repeated riffs, which always stay just long enough and not a moment too long.

The disc contains twelve purely instrumental tracks, providing a total of 76½ minutes of music with an average track length of over 6½ minutes. The title of album is taken from the longest track: Days of Sun and Days of Rain, a duet for two guitars, evokes a recollection of walking on the fells of the Buttermere Valley in all weathers. Guitarists will be struck immediately with a parallel with Francisco Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra, which by means of a solo guitar, evokes ‘recuerdos’ (‘reflections’, or ‘recollections’) of the Moorish palace near Granada.

As well as the finger-style guitar, David Ashworth plays the electric guitar; keyboards, and mallet instruments, and he is joined on four of the tracks by David Scarth, playing the electric bass guitar and guitar synthesizer.

A diverse array of influences is cited on the CD sleeve: the novelist Thomas Hardy; Jethro Tull (the band, not the agriculturist); Miles Davies; and traditional African cross-rhythms; and six of the twelve tracks are a musical response to poems by Mary Ashworth. They in turn, were inspired by diverse, sometimes nebulous influences: Orton Fell in Cumbria; the changing philosophical outlook of a holiday-maker during the course of a week-long holiday; the various forms of the colour blue; the dichotomy arising from the juxtaposition of pagan and Christian iconography; the scene depicted in a drawing by John Constable; and the harsh conditions borne by new-born lambs on the fellside.

This then is a disc of impressionist music. Not in the way of Debussy or Ravel, but of a child of the twentieth century tempered by the timelessness of nature.

John Mackenzie