Bass groupings are a hard thing to hear. Not a hard thing to do, necessarily � it's probably a lot of fun. But to listen to, to receive and retain the distinction of two collaborating musicians: the ears may not catch all the nuance, the mind fail to remain attuned to the deep lines.

J�elle L�andre and William Parker are two players who have the sensibility to pull off a quadruple bass session without letting it descend into mush. They've recorded in tandem before (Contrabasses, Leo, 1998), in a bass quartet with Barre Phillips and Tetsu Saitoh, and both duetted with the late, great Peter Kowald. They know, in other words, how to make the low-end duo more than a mere indulgence. Their duet Live at Dunois was recorded at the Sons D'Hiver Festival outside of Paris in 2009, and the clarity of the production here is notable. The bass is a noisy thing, with lots of extraneous buzzes and thuds, and recording engineer Jean Marc Foussat gets the right balance of music and natural sound in a nice stereo picture. L�andre's vocals, too, are nicely slightly off-mike, creating a warm room-sound without being hyperreal.

Given all of that, the six tracks here don't offer much by way of surprise, but that in itself shouldn't be a surprise either. Parker and L�andre are known quantities. Their duo, pizzicato on the one side, arco on the other, spontaneous and breathing, immediate and alive, is the product of two musicians whose common work ethic is about playing everywhere, every day, with as many people as possible. When the stars align properly, as they do here, the combustion is magical.