If this duo collaboration between guitarist Ralph Towner and trumpeter and flugelhorn player Paolo Fresu is a guide, they have forged a fruitful partnership. Throughout there’s an intimacy and ease to their dialoguing that suggests a near-perfect fit between Fresu’s spacious lyricism and Towner’s judicious mix of the spare and the orchestral as a soloist and partner. The contrast suits their reflective, subtly understated approach, as does the repertoire, which, apart from Miles Davis/Bill Evans’s Blue In Green and a couple of closing spontaneous improvs by the duo, was composed by Towner. Some, like Sacred Ground, heard on solo baritone guitar and in a brief duet with Fresu, the plaintive Wistful Thinking and the glorious Zephyr, are old; others, like Doubled Up, on whose bare bones, with Towner’s help, Fresu thrives as an improviser, are new. All are undeniably lovely. www.naxosdirect.ie