In tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman's tight circle of collaborators pianist Matthew Shipp is practically a centre point, a fulcrum for many of the groups that he's recorded with extensively over the past decade. Their duo is thus a kind of inner core to those larger outer layers, an essence of the distinctly personal flavour Perelman has infused in his work with little straying from a path of spontaneous composition. This 3CD builds effectively on 2016's The Art Of Perelman-Shipp and shows the extent to which the players are refining what could be called the art of the miniature insofar as the bulk of the pieces are ‘radio edit’ length – three to four minutes – rather than the epics that may have been expected of two artists classified for the most part as avant-garde. These are works of a highly concentrated, densely packed and digressional manner, where a new theme or counterpoint emerges to become a key statement rather than an aside, before giving way to another teasing slant of narrative direction. It's not just the harmonic openness of the music that catches the ear though, as the marks of distinction of each player come to the fore over the full repertoire, with Shipp's combination of momentously creepy whole tone descents, tidal bass rumbles and right hand double-Dutch making the songs walk with a deliciously lopsided gait while Perelman, for all his post-Ayler altissimo, is deeply impressive in his breathy sotto voce, which is a crucial component of the Gothic romanticism the duo achieves at its most lyrical. In fact, the way Perelman has woven another lineage, that of Ike Quebec and Ben Webster, alongside the role models that are arguably hipper i.e. Trane and the aforementioned Ayler, is a sign of the rich historical soil on which this fertile endeavour is planted. There is an argument to say that there is a single disc of ‘greatest hits’ to be mined from this set, but a compilation would run counter to the laisser aller aesthetic of the musicians and lessen the impact of the smart edit they have already done on the fly.