Guitarist Pat Metheny’s recording of John Zorn’s Tap: The Book of Angels, Vol. 20 from Zorn’s Masada Book Two is out this week on Nonesuch Records and Tzadik. The two artists spoke with the New York Times about the project, the first collaboration between the two artists, considered among their generation’s most innovative musicians.

"The audacious result is ... an album of six compositions culled from Mr. Zorn’s Jewish klezmer-influenced Masada oeuvre," says the New York Times music writer Nate Chinen, "and performed almost entirely by Mr. Metheny, on various guitars, keyboards and other instruments, including the Orchestrion. (The only other musician on the album is Mr. Metheny’s regular drummer, Antonio Sanchez.)"

Chinen goes on to write of Tap: "An impressive feat of imagination, and a strikingly clear distillation of both artists’ distinctive languages, the album strongly suggests an artistic dialogue."

Read more and hear what Metheny and Zorn had to say about Zorn's writing process, how Metheny came to record the pieces, and what developed from his doing so, in the article at nytimes.com.

To mark today's release of Tap in the UK, Pat Metheny and John Zorn appeared on BBC Radio 6 Music for Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone last night. You can listen to that interview, with clips from the new album, at bbc.co.uk; the segment begins at about 57 minutes in.

In the UK, the album earns four stars from the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Scotsman, and the Times of London. "It's all dazzlingly virtuosic and evocative," the Independent concludes.