I had the pleasure of interviewing Lê before a live audience at a jazz festival in Germany a few years ago. I wish someone had taped it (perhaps they did) because he gave some fascinating insights on how his style evolved, from his native Vietnamese music and indigenous instruments, to learning jazz, and then glocalising his jazz style by incorporating aspects of tuning, scales, folkloric references and what he calls ‘bent harmonics’ which he learned in Hà Nôi in 1979. He had his guitar with him and gave some examples of this – amazing. On Hà Nôi Duo he comes at the music from a ‘local’ perspective, but colouring his musical outlook from his jazz experiences in a way that he describes as “chiming with western ears”. On numbers such as ‘Like Mountain Birds’ and ‘Monkey Queen’, Lê subtly blends and elides eastern ensemble textures and vocals with western references (the electric guitar solo – plus Hendrix-like power chords on the former) or the way he and Paolo Fresu emerge from Vietnamese ensemble and vocal textures so subtly and with such deft love and respect of both eastern and western traditions, he might have created a classic that is truly “in the spirit of jazz”.