Free improvising, as Derek Bailey once put it, is not a style but a practice or, better still, a whole series of them. While some of these may appear totally unrelated to others, they all share one thing in common: they encompass a range of skills acquired through experience. And when one considers the two seasoned pros featured in this recording, no one could ever doubt their credentials. Yet, some may be surprised to have a 76-year-old pianist, best known for his long tenure as house pianist at London’s Ronnie Scott’s Club, paired with the recently fêted 60 year-old saxophonist par excellence of the British free music scene. But there they are, together for the first time: the consummate mainstreamer Stan Tracey and the improv hero himself, Evan Parker. With about 80 years of professional experience between them, it would be hard to imagine them not being able to make some meaningful music together. In fact, it only takes a single listen to this side to realize that there is more than some meaningful music taking place here, but an artistic statement of the highest order.

Throughout the eight duos, as well as the two solo piano tracks and the single tenor piece, the ideas flow effortlessly: To use Parker’s own metaphor on what sucessful improvising should be (alluded to in a interview published in The Squid's Ear last year), here are two craftsmen juggling ideas without letting any of them fall to the ground. The pianist, for his part, is exemplary in the way he keeps finding fresh turns of phrase. What’s more, he never falls back on licks of any kind, as if he checked all his standard jazz vocabulary at the door. He does more than just provide a chordal backdrop to the reedman’s flights of fancy, but manages to push the music in other directions, directions to which the saxophonist brilliantly responds. In do doing, the split second timing between them is superlative, at times telepathic. Parker is only heard on tenor; as usual, there’s no mistaking his sound and ligthening-fast articulation (including some transferring of his soprano playing to the bigger horn), but there is an added element of melodicism, an undercurrent of lyricism rarely heard in his playing. Indeed, this record is a fine balancing act (like juggling, once again) between instinct and design, reliance on the self and the other, doing things not only for their own sake, but saying plenty of remarkable things throughout the 62-minute disc of concentrated music making. To any nonbelievers in the practice of free improvisation, this side provides convincing evidence that it, too, can be very successful. What more can be said, but simply to concur with Parker’s own assessment, heard in the seconds following the final flurry of action with which the record closes: “Amazing!”