The provenance of this recording and the story of the accidental discovery of tapes made at the time are almost as exciting as the music itself.

It turns out that Ireland’s premier jazz musician, the guitarist Louis Stewart – then back in Dublin for good – got to hear that the great Jim Hall was in Ireland on holiday. The two men knew each other but had never played together as far as is known. So, why not get them together and arrange a concert?

Philip Watson’s superb booklet essay tells it all, emphasising the paucity of jazz activity in the city at the time and also explaining that locating a hall on Boxing Day (St Stephen’s Day, over there) was quite a challenge. Enter a man named Gerald Davis who found the Dublin Maccabi clubhouse and filled it. And there the trail ended, until a quarter-inch tape was discovered in the Davis archives in 2022 long after his death. Cleaned up, the recording is here now – and what a splendid discovery it is.

The two men fitted together admirably, sounding pretty similar, never short of ideas, Stewart arguably the fleeter of the two, Hall for all his quiet demeanour, the more determined when it came to harmonic changes and off-the-wall interjections.

His solo version of ‘My Funny Valentine’ includes what Watson calls ‘a near-blizzard of forcefully strummed single chords and fearless harmonic extensions’. Elsewhere it’s mostly standards that they select, whether playing rhythm, each man tucking in behind the other, or offering variations and exulting in companionable music-making.

Thinking back to his Rollins days, it’s no surprise that Hall selects ‘St Thomas’ and both men have a ball. The crowd loved it and Stewart is heard to say, “I guess it’s obvious that I’m enjoying myself.” Us, too.