Following a summer 1988 teaching assignment at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, singer Norma Winstone and pianist John Taylor got a short-notice request for a farewell duo concert at the college. This hour-long exercise in empathy, playfulness and dazzling techniques was the result. The pair had spent much of the previous decade refining those skills in the Azimuth chamber trio with Kenny Wheeler, and they're at the peak of their conversational powers here, in front of an audibly fervent crowd. Seven of the eight tunes are covers, and Winstone (the lyricist for four of them) is as haunting a storyteller on standards like ‘'Round Midnight’ and ‘Lucky To Be Me’ as she is a fearless wordless-improv skydiver when Taylor's mercurial tempo-changes crank up. Her famous lyric to Steve Swallow's ‘Ladies In Mercedes’ is soon jettisoned for percussive scat, and Egberto Gismonti's wistful ‘Café’ sets Winstone drifting ruminatively between falsetto whispers and rich low notes until Taylor introduces a provocatively rocking vamp. Monk's ‘'Round Midnight’ (segueing into ‘Midnight Sun’ and back) finds Winstone bending notes with a Billie Holiday-like guile, and Taylor's Latin-jiver ‘Coffee Time’ – quoting from both Chick Corea's ‘Spain’ and ‘The Coffee Song’ – raises the roof with its rocketing piano ostinato, handclapped rhythms, and piano-woodwork percussion. Winstone's premature entry to its stop-time improv section only increases the whole set's sense of a unique occasion on which caution is being thrown to the winds.