At first glance, the track lengths of Brian Godchaux and Sandy Rothman’s The Red Fiddle & The Silver Banjo might seem to contradict the album’s subtitle, The Long Form. Nothing on the 66-minute album stretches past the six-and-a-half minute mark. And yet, playing in the vernacular of conversational, instrumental, old-time music, the duo’s 13 tracks contain multitudes. Without vocals, the veteran musicians breeze through songs’ heads and spread out, fiddler Godchaux widening melodies, and Rothman digging in to find pastoral new spaces within traditional changes, his banjo juggling notes into bright new spots deep in “Texas Gallop” and well-worn fare like “Sail Away Ladies.” The duo’s shared history with the Grateful Dead—Rothman as a bluegrass jam partner with Jerry Garcia stretching back to the early ‘60s, Godchaux as brother to and collaborator with Dead keyboardist Keith—would seem to set them up for the job, but so do their subsequent careers. Whatever its pedigree, The Red Fiddle & The Silver Banjo is a lush and excellent listen, in the foreground as a pair of excellent players conversing, or in the background as the wordless beautiful texture of American string band music in one of its most casual and elegant manifestations.