Conversations is an album of improvisations featuring two musicians at the top of their form, Coat Cooke on saxophone and Joe Poole on drums, play with abandon and joy. Joe Poole is a masterful technical drummer who uses his gift fearlessly to juxtapose humour, grace, ferocity and complexity all in the service of great story telling. He has an uncanny sense to hear everything in a different way, and it’s a thrill to hear him generate and distill ideas to become expressions of incredible clarity. Coat Cooke embarks on adventures in sound with a palette of unusual timbres and themes. He has an unerring way of manipulating space through the use of silence to enhance and structure the sound canvas he creates. Duet improvisation is one of the most naked and vulnerable possibilities that musicians can explore. These are extraordinary conversations that we, the listener, get to overhear. "Vancouver saxophonist Coat Cooke has always been in ful...