Having put a considerable amount of gigs under its belt, the McCormack-Yarde collaboration understandably has more of a lived-in, road-tested feel than its auspicious 2010 debut, MY Duo. They sound generally more relaxed, less tentative and at times, bolder and emphatic when one prompts the other to raise the energy levels. For example, a piece such as the opener ‘D-Town’ sees both players dig into a hovering, blues inflected minor groove that they proceed to stretch and reshape without departing radically from the initial premise. The interest lies as much in incremental changes of attack, volume and accenting and the sense that the slow burn has real purpose. Equally enticing is ‘Dark Too Bright’, a Yarde piece that he recorded with J-Life back in 1998, in which both he and his accompanist take the lengthy theme, a burrowing, bop-slanted line, and highlight its dual character as slow rhythm and fast melody. Teasing tempo as they do on that tune is one of many strategies deployed to bring a focused touch of drama to the performance. Yet both players also impress through their creation of interesting timbres, be it the subtle implication of another reed, such as oboe, which Yarde conjures through the gauzy purr of his soprano, or a piano chord that McCormack lets teeters right on the brink of atonality. In a stripped down setting such as a duo where any stray breath or brush on the keyboard is held up to scrutiny, the players have an added responsibility to make sure that every single note counts, and what McCormack and Yarde show in no uncertain terms is a winning combination of discipline and freedom, drawing liberally on a large pool of jazz and classical vocabularies, knowing when to add that extra beat to a phrase and when to leave it be. Beautifully captured in the highly atmospheric Ship studio, Places And Other Spaces is a fine document of two strong characters who are able to buttress their technical ingenuity with considerable emotional depth.