By the time a teenage banjoist called Béla Fleck had become entranced by Chick Corea’s music in the 1970s, the piano star had already been anointed by Miles Davis, and become an emerging force in rock and Latin fusions with jazz. Fleck was a quarter-century older and a multi-Grammy-winning legend of bluegrass and a swathe of jazz, classical and global crossovers before the two finally played together in the 2000s. As the millennium turned, they began guesting on each other’s projects, and by 2007, they had become an enthrallingly compatible duo.

After Corea’s death in 2021, Fleck pondered some unreleased 2019 duo concert recordings, and sound files the pair had exchanged in the lockdowns, and Remembrance is his grateful and meticulous collation of that music. Corea’s never-previously-released pieces ‘Enut Nital’ (‘Latin tune’ backwards) and ‘Continuance’ are garrulously conversational groovers and gracefully waltzing sways respectively, Fleck’s ‘The Otter Creek Incident’ is an eager country-jive that turns bluesily funky, and ‘Juno’ (for the banjoist’s son) is a playfully dancing invitation to call-and-response. Monk’s ‘Bemsha Swing’ is an absolute barnstormer of blistering improv counterpoint in the head, turning to hurtling swing-comping and solo-swapping as it unfolds. Scarlatti gets a cameo role in some deliciously interwoven baroque pirou-ettes, and Fleck’s jagged, zigzaggy ‘Small Potatoes’ hints at the sonically exploratory free-playing ingenuity Corea touched on with 1970-71’s Circle, but which his mainstream acclaim never opened a path back to. Touching on all that ground, Béla Fleck’s Remembrance is a unique document.