'Discomfort’ is the unexpected emotion guitarist Sean Shibe singles out in his introduction to ‘Broken Branches’. It was his discomfort and that of tenor Karim Sulayman – both artists whose heritage and lived experience spans the traditional divide of East and West – that was the driving force behind this singular collaboration.

The keystone of a programme that encompasses songs by Monteverdi, Caccini and Britten, music by 20th-century popular artists Sayed Darwish and Fairuz, contemporary works by Takemitsu and Layale Chaker as well as anonymous traditional melodies, is Jonathan Harvey’s Sufi Dance. It’s a piece, Shibe explains, that melts conventional arrangement into an approximation mediated by memory (or its failure) and personal experience. It posits an alternative to Orientalist appropriations, homages or fossilisations in Western art song that the whole album seeks to amplify and explore.

It’s a thoughtful and idiosyncratic project, one carried through in several arrangements and realisations by the two musicians that blur the line between song and art song into something broadly ‘folkish’. Shibe is articulate both as collaborator and soloist, his guitar nimble and glittering in the filigree ornamentation of Caccini’s ‘Dalla porta d’oriente’ – Moorish metalwork in sound – haunting in the evocative harmonics and ghost-echoes and doublings of the Harvey and crooning in the Arab-Andalusian song-without-words ‘Lamma bada yatathanna’.

Sulayman’s flexible, light tenor is a pleasant enough instrument (and so it should be, with a Grammy Award behind him, for ‘Songs of Orpheus’ – Avie, 8/18). He’s good at unaffected, folk-direct delivery – shown off best in Darwish’s ‘El helwa di’ and Fairuz’s ‘Li Beirut’. But I found it hard to ignore the same ‘paleness and shortness of sap and sweetness’ that Hugo Shirley identified in his review of Sulayman’s ‘Where Only Stars Can Hear Us’ (7/20).

This wan, sometimes floury tone is most exposed in a dangerously slow take on Dowland’s ‘Time Stands Still’ and in Britten’s Songs from the Chinese, where we miss contrast and clarity of mood. The vivid colours and lines Shibe draws from Takemitsu’s solo ‘Wainscot Pond’ from In the Woods only call attention to the faded distance we get elsewhere, especially in Chaker’s ‘A Butterfly in New York’, where a vocal line somewhere between chant and recitative should light up Sinan Antoon’s text, not dull and recess it. It’s a shame, because this highly personal project is full of interest, its big ideas just not quite fulfilled in performance.