When I went to see Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie in January 1984, I was primed to love their guitar duets by my love for the "Space" sections of Grateful Dead concerts with guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. Towner and Abercrombie may have been playing tunes, but they often ended up in the "Space" of free improvisation. Then, when I went to see Towner's band Oregon a few months later, they announced after a long first section that they had just played Towner's composition "The Rapids", while the piece before that had been "something we just made up." It was again like the Dead, with "Space" seguing into a song. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 January 2026)