A release by heroes dedicated to another. Frisell has of course been a long time collaborator of Gibbs and worked with Vu a decade back on It's Mostly Residual, so these artists are no strangers to each other. But this is no cosy up on the sofa. From the opening ‘Ballet’ Frisell and Vu twist and tangle, in a dance that's as muscular as it is delicate. Vu is in many ways the perfect Gibbs horn man: generous of tone and vision he grasps those big themes and bigger emotions with gusto; but in Frisell's subtleties and fragilities he has the perfect foil. One of the unexpected joys of Ballet is that three of it's five live cuts are from Gibbs' debut two releases, from all those decades ago, which so changed the Brit-jazz scene and brought a whole generation of new listeners to the music. It all climaxes tumultuously with the deep, deep groove of ‘And On The Third Day’, as both build and build around that ecstatic theme. And just when it couldn't get any better, there's Frisell deconstructing what remains, I guess, Gibbs' ‘greatest hit’, the lonesome ballad ‘Sweet Rain’, but we're oh so far from Stan Getz here.