Jazz
Jojo Records · 5 June 2026
Vernon Duke’s “What Is There To Say” is the only piece on “Duets” that passes six minutes, and half of the eight do not reach four minutes. The record runs just over thirty-four minutes and was cut in a single day, 4 December 2024, at the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs. There is a double bass and a guitar, and nothing else.
Ron Carter is eighty-nine, and on 4 August 1972, at the Playboy Club in New York, he cut the first of the three duo albums he made with Jim Hall: it was “Alone Together”, and Milestone put it out in 1973. The other two are “Live at Village West” (recorded in 1982 and released in 1984) and “Telephone” (August 1984, released in 1985), both on Concord. Yotam Silberstein, born in Tel Aviv and based in New York, contributes two compositions of his own out of the eight. The session fell on 4 December, which is Hall’s birthday. Maureen Sickler engineered, Nancy Conforti mixed, Shane Carroll and Andreas K. Meyer mastered, and Simon Belelty produced for Jojo Records.
One of Silberstein’s two pieces is “Blues For Brother Malone”, and the Malone of the title is Russell Malone, who died of a heart attack in Tokyo on 23 August 2024, aged sixty. He was touring Japan in a Carter trio, with the pianist Donald Vega. The album session is three months and eleven days later, and the room it was made in is the one Hall and Carter had used. Silberstein’s other original is “Rain Again”, a waltz.
A duo without drums lives on stretching out, and here they stretch out once. “Love Letters” (3:28), “The Lamp Is Low” (2:57), “They Say It’s Wonderful” (3:50) and “Mil Dew” (3:15) all four stay at the length of a 45, and three of them sit in the second stretch of the record, which is where the conversation already had ground to stand on. Six of the eight pieces are other people’s: the conversation always ends inside a known tune and never leaves it.
“Mil Dew” is Johnny Griffin’s and runs on the “I Got Rhythm” changes. The record opens with “Nova Ilusão”, which predates bossa nova.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents