Valitutto (piano) and Wilson (tenor sax) spent quite a while playing back and forth. When they liked where they were, they recorded. And then they assembled. The finished product is astonishingly cohesive and hardly sounds improvisational at all.

Richard Valitutto & Dave Wilson Slant (pfMENTUM)

That last bit is a double-edged sword, to be sure, but what I mean is that these pieces sound composed. The improvs don't wander off into tangentland, but rather they serve the purpose of the song. Perhaps that's what happens when you trade ideas almost endlessly until something really good comes along.

For a while, I thought some of the interplay might have been spliced together, but going back I think most (if not all) was recorded at the same time. There's too much bleed for this to have been a purely produced set. No matter how it came together, this album really sings when the two are going at the music (and each other) full force.

A really striking set. I would still put this more in traditional jazz rather than improvisational, but perhaps it's better to imagine this work as sitting within both circles of a Venn diagram. But that analysis is unnecessary. The soaring emotion of the work is more than enough to make me sweat. Blissful.

Jon Worley