Having performed together briefly at Dalston's Vortex in 2009, this Brazilian pianist and percussionist decided to take it further and hook up again at the same club to record an album, this time though without any paying punters. Audience or no audience you still get the sense they are playing in a ‘live’ space and part of that is a willingness to improvise on the fly. The pianist Benjamin Taubkin is from São Paulo, and has spent some time promoting creative Brazilian music in Europe, while the percussionist Adriano Adewale has been based in London since 2000, having arrived first as a touring sideman of world-jazz guitarist Antonio Forcione. The opener is the album's centrepiece, a close to 14 minutes version of Bill Evans' ‘Blue in Green’, though Taubkin adds ‘...in Yellow’ to the colour combination to reflect the addition of a Brazilian vibe. On it the pianist contrasts tantalising dance-like rhythms and epic swirls of chords against a dreamier meditative tone, that's the essence of this modernist classic. Taubkin's playing is never dull but the track turns out to be the weakest of the four on the session as a series of erratic dramatic twists and turns tend to undermine the piece's flow and sense of direction. But Taubkin's ‘Paisagens – Impressões da Irlanda’ is more like it, and as is suggested by the title, the blend of Celtic-song melancholy and exchange of fractured rhythms between piano and percussion is infectious. Although ostensibly in a backseat role, Adewale's tasteful polyrhythmic percussion has an understated finesse about it. On the closing tango-like ‘Berimbau’ Adewale adds a different colour performing on the Afro-Brazilian single-stringed instrument indicated by its title.