Simcock & Goloubev: Reverie at Schloss Elmau – review

Gwilym Simcock has collected almost every jazz prize going, but his work, as both pianist and composer, ranges so widely that it amounts to a genre of its own. It combines the mercurial, improvised flow of jazz with the consistency and detail of European classical music. In Russian bassist Yuri Goloubev he has obviously found a collaborator with the same expansive imagination and equal virtuosity. The interplay between the two is like musical telepathy. These nine duets, with their changing moods, harmonic light-and-shade and fleeting melodies, are almost too rich to take in at one hour's listening.