Two Rivers, One Blues: James Speck Rehearses with the Musicians of Kampot

Three weeks into his residency at Knai Bang Chatt, composer and animator James Speck has taken his Mississippi-meets-Mekong project out of the studio and into a Kampot music shop, working through arrangements with local players ahead of the piece's first performance.

When Speck first described the project, back in his opening weeks at Art for Kep, it was still mostly an idea: a piece of music built to hold the Mississippi Delta blues he grew up on next to the Khmer instruments he fell for after hearing the great chapei master Kong Nay. Gershwin was in there too, and a half-forgotten Minneapolis bluesman named Willie Murphy. What he was missing, he said at the time, was the musicians to help him find out whether the idea actually worked.

That search has now moved from conversation to rehearsal room — in this case, a Kampot music shop strung with guitars, its back wall painted floor to ceiling with a rainbow piano keyboard and two outsized murals of a blue and an orange acoustic guitar. Speck sits at the keyboard, arms crossed, listening hard, while across from him a Kampot musician works a bow through a passage on a traditional Khmer two-string fiddle, brow furrowed in concentration — the particular stillness of a composer clocking someone else's phrasing before deciding what to build underneath it.

It's a smaller, plainer scene than the one Speck describes for the finished piece — clarinet from an Australian player, a cellist he was still hoping to find a month ago, Khmer instruments woven through a blues chassis. But it's exactly the kind of session the residency was built to produce: an outsider's idea, tested in real time against the ears and instincts of the musicians who actually know the room it has to work in. Two rivers, as Speck put it earlier this month — the Mississippi and the Mekong — carrying, in his ear at least, the same kind of music. Whether Kampot's players hear it the same way is precisely what these afternoons are for.

The piece is expected to have its first outing before Speck's residency at Knai Bang Chatt wraps up, part of the string of performances, exhibitions and open studios that Art for Kep has hosted through the month.