With neither musician falling back on a well-worn series of musical ideas but rather reacting with freshness in the moment, Duet is more than just an all-star duet recording.

Hiromi Uehara and Chick Corea are different artists, separated by several decades in age, but there are many similarities between them that make Duet: Chick and Hiromi a rewarding experience. Corea has done pretty much everything. Coming out of his time with the very heavy rock-influenced bands that Miles Davis was leading at the time, he went deeply into free jazz with the group Circle, which also included Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, and Dave Holland. He formed the light Brazilian/jazz group Return to Forever, and after two albums morphed that group into a heavy fusion, practically progressive rock band. When RTF wound down, Corea went back to acoustic piano and the musical influence of his Hispanic heritage, recording floridly romantic albums such as My Spanish Heart and Leprechaun. He divided time between the Chick Corea Akoustic and Elektric bands, and he went back to trio work, which he had not done since his groundbreaking album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs. Now Corea engages in whatever style takes his fancy, alternating on a regular basis between acoustic and electric, jazz, classical, and rock.

Hiromi has not been around for very long compared to Corea, but she has already demonstrated an unwillingness to respect musical boundaries, recording trio albums, working with her heavy, fusion-influenced Sonic Bloom, and now collaborating with Corea and with Stanley Clarke and Lenny White on Clarke’s first trio album. Her compositions veer from the classically-influenced to rock, techno, and straight ahead jazz.

One thing that comes through loud and clear on Duet is that Hiromi is an incredibly accomplished pianist, and that her stylistic changes and quirks are absolutely not gimmicks. The fleetness with which she and Corea exchange ideas on the Corea composition “Windows,” which opens Disc 2, shows a sharp musical mind at work, blessed with all the technique necessary to bring that mind’s thoughts to fruition. In this setting, Corea sounds very inspired, calling on his own considerable improvisational talents. With neither musician falling back on a well-worn series of musical ideas but rather reacting with freshness in the moment, Duet is more than just an all-star duet recording. It is a performance in which both musicians come alive, inviting the focused listener along to new musical planes.

Both musicians are superb technicians, and if some listeners find the whipsaw-paced fugue of Hiromi’s “Old Castle, By the River, in the Middle of a Forest” to be too much flash and not enough substance, there is more than enough depth in the duo’s renditions of ‘Summertime,’ Bill Evans’ ‘Very Early,’ ‘How Insensitive,’ ‘Fool On the Hill,’ and the closing ‘Concerto de Aranjuez/Spain.’

Duet is a record of a performance that captures the magic of collaboration between one of jazz’s finest pianist/composers and one of its most promising talents.