Enrico Rava has a particular affinity for working in duo with pianists, his notable previous collaborators including Stefano Bollani and Enrico Pieranunzi. In 2021 he played some concerts with Fred Hersch and the result is another fine partnership which led to more concerts earlier this year, with a further crop due in Europe during the late autumn.

However, their 2021 collaboration was captured for posterity by ECM, and the album they have created plays brilliantly to the strengths of both musicians. The opening ‘Retrato Em Banca E Preto’ takes the Jobim composition and probes at it sensitively and co-operatively, so that Rava's stabbing phrases are countered by Hersch's sense of texture, and then a solo piano passage acts as a springboard for further joint exploration.

The mood carries through into a lengthy free improvisation, but also into the way they approach a pair of their own compositions, and a handful of standards. A fragmented opening to ‘I'm Getting Sentimental Over You’ (at quite a lively pace) opens into a fuller examination of the song, with Rava's innate lyricism contrasting with his occasional – sometimes almost random - flurries of notes, and it is this blend of the unexpected and the lyrical that makes the album work so well.

Hersch has long been an exponent of Thelonious Monk's music and the high point here is their joint reading of ‘Misterioso’, its perpetuum mobile followed by a masterly piano solo version of ‘Round Midnight’ that eschews the traditional opening for one of Hersch's inimitable introductions, followed by a meditation that is the aural equivalent of a shimmering chandelier in the half-light of a darkened room.