The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

Duets for tenor saxophone and piano trace a through line back to each instrument’s early ascendancy as modern jazz implements. Coleman Hawkins hung his horn on the accompaniment of Buck Washington’s ivories way back 1934 and countless other dyadic partnerships sprouted in their wake to date. The combination of Mark Turner and Ethan Iverson in such a configuration almost seems overdue given their other artistically fortuitous associations over the years. Temporary Kings presents the ripe and savory aural fruit of a studio encounter in plucked from the figurative vine last summer in Lugano, Switzerland. Compositionally, Iverson has six entries to Turner’s two, but participation remains equal in the contexts of the pieces they perform on together. The pristine ECM acoustics are a boon, revealing every nuance and perhaps more importantly, every pause and patch of measured silence in each dialogue.

The tenor of Turner’s horn is consistently one of subtle and sanguine surprises. Aerated and cottony, his phrases breathe across a breadth of registers, sometimes skirting the edges of the soprano spectrum and even on occasion sounding similar to a clarinet. Iverson is similarly rangy, his fingers and feet working the keys and pedals of a Steinway with a rich melodicism enlivened by attention to spatial dynamics never far from the forefront. The lively and intimate dances on the jocularly-titled “Turner’s Chamber of Unlikely Delights” and “Unclaimed Freight” each thrive on the duo’s vibrant congeniality, manifesting in a stream of spooling, overlapping patterns that studiously avoid clutter or cliché.

The lone cover of the session, Warne Marsh’s “Dixie’s Dilemma” is a bit of a ringer given both players longstanding scholarship toward the dearly departed tenorist’s tenorist. Iverson initiates a rolling left hand rhythm punctuated by incremental right hand melody and Turner respectfully hangs back. His delayed entrance is perfectly timed and the two players build to close and clean Marshian weave as culmination. “Yesterday’s Bouquet”, a melancholy original ballad, features Iverson alone and Turner handles the opening of “Myron’s World” in isolation as well with a flurry of gentle ornamental salvos that mine the natural resonances of his bell. The next six minutes are a sustained and sophisticated study in engrossing conversation. The penultimate piece “Third Familiar” is the first to introduce fine-spun tonal dissonances as the two take a darker turn without resorting to obvious bombast or aggression.

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