Italian double bassist Stefano Scodanibbio, who died in 2012, was renowned for the ease with which he negotiated scores, often his own commissions, by modern composition big cheeses like Xenakis, Donatoni, Ferneyhough and Bussotti, and also for his enduring fascination with the processes of improvisation. Scodanibbio was in the audience at the 2005 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville to see William Parker, a bassist of very different pedigree, premiere ‘For Percy’, a piece dedicated to the memory of Percy Heath. A connection was made – “I sensed he had a deep spirit,” Parker recalls – and three years later at the Teatro San Giorgio in Udine the two men played their first, and sadly only, duo concert. This big-boned and ambitious music speaks over extended structural measures. The unity of their shared language is obvious from the off and is achieved without either player compromising or taming their basic approach. Scodanibbio spent much of his career painstakingly unravelling dense notation, which, in the case of Ferneyhough, purposefully overloaded musicians with information in order to keep their brains rolling with the moment. And much of this music is similarly obsessed with different definitions of energy-flow, the opening piece dealing up delicately balanced tremolos and fleet finger-work that totter forwards, the second concerned with an intricate mesh of mechanisms that are given momentum by shifting accents and subliminal rhythmic reboots. Grooves move by stealth, sometimes materialising as both bassists make a collective snap decision to swap direction, but never as a ‘and now here's some jazz’ gear-change. Alert, ardent music-making.