For two days in a Californian basement studio, American saxophonist Sam Gendel and Brazilian guitarist Fabio do Nascimento used their combined virtuosity to explore the far reaches of their instruments and their imaginations.

The result was The Room, a 10-track album which sounds warm, intimate, and alive. In ‘Capricho’, the duo dance and joust with fast-paced Brazilian rhythms, with Do Nascimento’s seven-string providing a constant pulse and counter-melody to Gendel’s own étude-like explorations on soprano.

Gendel’s lilting style is evocative of traditional South American flute music in tracks like ‘Astral Flowers’ and ‘Tupi’, where the music enters folkier realms. In parts of ‘Poeira’, one can hear echoes of Gendel’s duo project with Sam Wilkes in the slightly breathy, repetitive lines. Where The Room differs is in its engagement with classically-informed harmony and song structure, typical of Brazilian 20th-century repertoire - the musicians cite Hermeto Pascoal as a shared inspiration. The result is that each track has a story, moving from joy to melancholy, through the subtleties in between, guided by our two faithful narrators.