There is something that seems profoundly right when two pianos are joined together for a concert. For our ears, the music is multiplied, branches off in different directions and then comes together again in a duplicated score that seems to create an extraordinary three-dimensionality, as if we were being offered an entry into another dimension. Then, with our eyes, we glimpse a perfect geometry when these two instruments come together on a stage, fitting their undulating forms together like the pieces of an obvious jigsaw puzzle, two sides of the same music, two opposite parts facing one another, but also watching one another.

After many years of friendship and improvised conversations on stage, in March 2018, Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn met up with one another in Budapest in order to record their first album together as a duo, under the watchful guidance of Manfred Eicher. This was obviously an important milestone in the careers of these two famous award-winning jazz pianists, but it was also a perfect and appropriate moment for blowing out the candles in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the record company ECM.