The follow-up to saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock's vigorous Kasumi duo album on Intakt with Japanese piano virtuoso Aki Takase is this similarly seamless merger of improv and composition with Vancouver-born pianist Kris Davis – an old connection begun in a Manhattan bar that preceded Laubrock's move from London to New York in 2008, which has also brought Davis into the lineup of the saxophonist's adventurous Anti-House ensemble.

Both artists are imaginative and virtuosic free-improvisers, but it's their creative framing of spontaneity inside structures with distinctive story-shapes that makes their work such an inviting bridge between contemporary-jazz and contemporary-classical music. The slow weave of the title track here almost suggests an old-school ballad, but its melody is lateral and gently dissonant, its improv sometimes busy and staccato, sometimes delicately airy. There are ambient episodes, like ‘Flying Embers’ and ‘Elephant in The Room’, drifting on deep tenor tones or soprano quiverings, gently tracked by trickling treble-piano lines. The extended opener, ‘Snakes And Lattice’, passes through dramatic scene-changes from long-tone interval jumps to unison-melody scampers, to percussively Evan Parkeresque tenor improv, to a spacious, pensive coda. ‘Whistlings’, an engagingly abstract soprano/piano dance, sounds like music for an imaginary ballet, ‘Golgi Complex’ features some scalding Davis soloing over a sinewy free-groove, that bends close enough to orthodoxy to repeat a punchy three-note piano hook in its closing stages. Laubrock says of her relationship with Davis ‘we are kindred spirits’, and that's audible all over this fine session.