Few artists have shown the courage of their convictions as tenor saxophonist Perelman has in the past two decades. Commitment to spontaneous composition. Commitment to documenting all his sessions. Commitment to long-term creative relationships. Hence a relatively small circle of collaborators of which Shipp is one of the most consistent, appearing both in quartets and duos with Perelman. This latest release presents the two men over four CDs worth of music, begging the primary question of whether quality justifies quantity. There’s no easy answer. On one hand there are moments where the spark of inspiration is not quite there, and the players struggle to make a meaningful artistic statement that conveys both the strength of an idea and its sustained development. On the other hand, the priceless asset Perelman and Shipp have is an individual beauty of sound and a shared vocabulary that invariably leads to moments of triumph on the back of struggle. Several of the pieces, particularly on the third disc, have attractively prickly, wry melodies, but the magic really lies in the ongoing conversation between two strong characters. Perelman has a compelling way of dislocating and dicing his phrases, or following a withering shriek with a sensual soft descent, like a long trail of evening mist. He is counterweighted by Shipp’s moving breeze blocks in the mid and low range as well as his subtle shadings in the high, which makes the work at once intimate and invigorating, pushing the Trane-Monk, Shepp-Waldron, Ware-Shipp continuum into a very personal space. The songs are seductively austere, but they also demonstrate a notable concision, clocking in at the three to five-minute mark, like shadowy miniatures with maximum attention to detail.