I first came across the long-honed empathy of London alto saxophonist Martin Speake and the American pianist/composer Ethan Iverson in 2002, playing as a quiet duo in the original Stoke Newington premises of London's Vortex club – the pair had met and clicked a decade earlier in workshops curated by Steve Coleman at Canada's Banff Centre for The Arts, when Iverson was only 17. Intention is the latest chapter in a story that has survived the pianist's long absences with The Bad Plus and was recorded at Trinity Laban Conservatoire last year with the coolly provocative Royal Academy alumni Fred Thomas and James Maddren on bass and drums. The set is mostly a retrospective for Speake, revisiting and remaking original themes going back to his earliest solo albums – in the process fascinatingly mapping his personal reactions to many jazz persuasions, from heartfelt Coltrane-like balladeering around a hypnotic tonal centre (‘Becky’), to a breezy groove with John Scofield and Eddie Harris origins (‘Twister’), or the Django-Bates-meets-Ornette surge and retreat of ‘Magic Show’. Speake also applies a characteristically delicate fusion of spacey hoots and cool accelerations to the standard ‘Dancing In The Dark’, and shares a brilliant bop-swapping game with a headlong Iverson on the staccato Charlie Parker theme ‘Charlie's Wig'. If Ethan Iverson's retirement from The Bad Plus means this playfully sophisticated and very musical quartet now has a busier future, that's great news for contemporary jazz.