CD version. Temporary Kings is the first duo record by tenor saxophonist Mark Turner and pianist Ethan Iverson. Without bass or drums, the two build a kind of chamber jazz in which every line carries harmony as well as melody. The record draws on the cool school of Lennie Tristano and Warne Marsh, which both players hear as a bridge towards modernist chamber music. The programme moves between composed chamber pieces, a crooked blues, a solo piano ballad and a 1950s tune by Marsh.

Turner and Iverson first met at New York jam sessions in the 1990s. About a decade later they played together in the quartet of drummer Billy Hart, appearing on two ECM albums by that band. The duo session took place in June 2017 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. Iverson wrote six of the nine pieces and Turner two, while the remaining one is by Marsh.

The opener, Lugano, is named after the town where the album was recorded. It is a melodic piece with an almost Ravelian air, built on interlocking improvised phrases. Marsh's Dixie's Dilemma, a 1956 contrafact on All the Things You Are, brings a lighter step. Iverson walks a bass line under Turner, and the two finish in parallel lines. In the solo Yesterday's Bouquet Iverson opens on five rising chords, then moves through nearly two centuries of piano harmony, with echoes of Bill Evans and Monk. Elsewhere there is an off-kilter blues, Unclaimed Freight, and Turner's Myron's World, a tune that many players of his generation already treat as a near-classic.

Reviewers heard the restraint as the point of the record. In The Washington Post in 2018, Chris Richards wrote that the two "sound like they're building a house of cards in the void". Peter Bacon, in London Jazz News, found no arguments between the players, only "sober but intense discussion". The album came out less than a year after Iverson left The Bad Plus, the trio he had co-founded in 2000.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2583, released on 7 September 2018.