Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau appear to have been circling each other for some time now. The guitarist first heard the young pianist with Joshua Redman, who told him: 'I think you're going to like him when you hear him.'
That conversation took place in 1993, when Metheny was recording Redman's Wish album. A year later, while driving, he heard Chill, a track from Redman's follow-up, Mood Swing, and had to pull over to the side of the road to listen.
'It was strong and original, and exuded a confidence and point of view that I had been hungering to hear from a new player,' Metheny says. 'I remember thinking that Josh was really right - I loved this guy right away.'
The admiration was mutual. Mehldau cites hearing the live version of Are You Going With Me from the Pat Metheny Group's Travels album - one of the few early pieces Metheny still performs in concert - as a moment of musical epiphany.
'Soon after Travels I discovered As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls, and, well, that would be another one on that short list of five or six life-changing moments,' says Mehldau. 'I put Pat up there with Miles Davis, John Coltrane or Keith Jarrett - musicians who raised the stakes in terms of the expressive possibility and emotional fulfilment a listener can receive from jazz, as instrumentalists, improvisers, bandleaders and composers.'
Yet it took them more than a decade to get together. Metheny was so struck with Mehldau's trio that he poached his bassist, Larry Grenadier, for a trio of his own with drummer Bill Stewart, which released a studio and then a live album, in 1999 and 2000.