The French pianist-composer Benoît Delbecq is probably best known over here for his exciting, cutting-edge projects (Ambitronix, The Recyclers) with long term collaborator Paris-based drummer-electronics Steve Argüelles. In a quite unique setting of a double-piano trio (a French-American collaboration funded by FAJE) Argüelles joins Delbecq’s French trio alongside the brilliant ex-Steve Lacy-collaborator Jean-Jacques Avenel. The influential pianist Fred Hersch leads an American trio that includes Mark Helias and Gerry Hemingway, a pair who have a long association having recorded together in the 1980s with Ray Anderson in the band BassDrumBone. The traditional instrumental roles are made flexible to give more a feeling of a sextet than a double trio. The set highlights Delbecq’s experiments with prepared piano and his compositions (aside from a version of Ornette Coleman’s ‘Lonely Woman’) have a contrapuntal flow of instrumental interplay with ambiguous harmonies that are creative fuel for the vivid imagination of Hersch. But there is also more loosely organised groove-based material in the swinging Monk-ish themed ‘Night For Day’, the hypnotic spacey ‘Tide’ with an Argüelles electronic treatment of a ghostly piano sonic, and a rivetingly atmospheric version of the above mentioned ‘Lonely Woman’.