Romanian folk and Motor City blues combine for some stonking jazz

“A singular and unlikely pairing they are: a baritone saxophonist born in Detroit in 1967 when the sounds of  Motown were at their apex, and a pianist from the Transylvanian village of Teaca in agricultural Romania, born in 1969, where he grew up listening to the folk music played at weddings, birthdays and festivals . . .  their partnership is powerfully empathetic, just as intensely so when Harding turns to bass clarinet in Resonance, with Ban striding up and down his keys . . . This amalgam of the lyrical and the visceral is forged through African Blutopia and Duke Ellington’s African Flower, with Ban’s sublime subtlety inside every one of his lines . . .  a deep, delving album of many earthen beauties, a conjunction of the US and Romania entirely unexpected, powerfully surprising” Click to read full review