During his instatement at Wesleyan, Braxton has been exceedingly generous in the amount of documentation he's provided for his students and fellow professors. Given the uneven quality of some of these releases, one might say generous to a fault; some sessions were only a shade or two above noodling. Happily, this duo with the impressive young cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum works on a serious musical level as well as providing Bynum a very fine showcase for his considerable talent.

Two of the pieces are new ones by Braxton, the prolific composer having recently edged over the 300 mark. "Composition 304 (+91, 151, 164)" shows scant evidence of the Ghost Trance Music that has preoccupied Braxton since around 1995. Instead, it harkens back to works like "Composition 36," heard on the Sackville album Trio and Duet, with ghostly, deeply evocative unison lines that trace a long, relaxed pattern throughout the piece. Any connectivity between adjacent pieces is difficult to discern as "Composition 305 (+ language improvisation, 44)" bears no obvious similarity to its numerical predecessor. Instead, it's an antsier piece with convoluted lines that intertwine, bounce off each other and generate mini-solos like small blooms on a thorny shrub. From these two compositions, it's quite clear that Braxton is showing no letdown on the exploratory front.

Three of the intervening tracks are by Bynum, each bearing the stamp of his teacher to a degree but also evincing enough originality to stand steadily on their own. "Scrabble" and "All Roads Lead to Middleton" have a bit of the madcap jauntiness of Braxton's bop-oriented work from the '70s though the former evolves very nicely into a more contemplative area that evokes fellow saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell's "Tnoona." This feeling carries into "To Wait," a lovely, sparse rumination that shows a thing or two Bynum may have picked up while working with the quiet improv scene in Boston and musicians like B hob Rainey. Only the "improvisation," interestingly enough, fails to attain any conceptual sharpness as it meanders a bit (albeit pleasantly enough) and Braxton falls into patterns that those who have followed his music for any length of time will quickly recognize. Though any duo album tends to place the spotlight on the musicians' chops, one of the strengths of this disc is the premium put on both compositional framework and the empathetic reactions between players as opposed to their manual dexterity. While Bynum is clearly an instrumental force to be reckoned with and Braxton plays with his usual extraordinary command, it's the ideas that are offered up and buffeted about that make Duets (Wesleyan) 2002 one of the better Braxton recordings of the last decade.