condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Textured sleeve.

1960, New York, and a quartet co-led by a married couple. Toshiko Akiyoshi had come from Tokyo via Berklee with a Bud Powell vocabulary and a compositional ambition nobody expected; Charlie Mariano was a Boston alto player of real fire who had done time with Stan Kenton. Together, for Nat Hentoff's short-lived and superb Candid label, they made a hard bop record with an unusual amount of writing in it: Akiyoshi's tunes are angular and carefully structured, and the interplay between piano and alto suggests two people who had been arguing about music over breakfast for years.

Japanese pressing of the Candid album. One of the best things either of them recorded, from a label whose entire catalogue is worth chasing.