The parenthetical "s" in the title is neither throwaway nor cutesy marketing. Its curvature and ambiguity as to starting and ending point serves as a guidepost to the highly focused 51 minutes contained herein. This multi-generational Swiss-Italian convocation generates both a sound, and also sounds and the porousness between them, like having a foot on either side of their border.

Swiss drummer Pierre Favre began recording in the '50s, Italian drummer Andrea Centazzo about two decades later, while Italian vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli and pianist Francesca Gemmo are more of the new millennium. The elders go back to a duet from 1977 and there have been other collaborations among the principals in ensembles of varying sizes beginning several years before this session, made across two days in late 2024. That is a lot of history to unpack, if one is so inclined, yet the outcome is cohesive and non-hierarchical, whether it is respective to age or the role of the "rhythmic" versus "melodic" instruments. The eight pieces are presented as numbered movements in a suite and thus one can assume were conceived with internal connection above a typical collection of improvisations.

Different motifs appear during the segments: muted piano strings; rumbling tom rolls; clanky cymbal work. Moods evoked include fantastical, martial, dissonant, lyrical. The second movement is comprised of small phrases lurching alongside one another; the fourth comes closest to a free jazz paradigm; vibraphone works in minimalist fashion in the fifth, piano in a subversive waltzing around it; the final movement more mysterious and open-ended than conclusive.

It is to the quartet's credit that they are as cooperative in the gentle and slow-moving understatement of the third movement as they are in the sixth's evocation of Monk's ugly beauty or the seventh's absolute loveliness, achieved through piano-vibraphone symbiosis, drums commenting with the lightest of touches.