Liner Notes: Collective improvisation captures the essence of our musical dialogue heard on this album – it allowed us to rediscover familiar and less-familiar compositions, and exploit uncharted melodic, harmonic and rhythmic territories. The title track, “Crossing Paths,” sets the mood for the entire album with a two-part imitative melody that grows into a collective improvisation. “Kary’s Trance” is a composition by Lee Konitz based on the harmonic progression of “Play Fiddle Play.” While reading about Arthur Altman’s “Play Fiddle Play” in the Great Song Thesaurus, we discovered that it borrows the chord changes from Herbert’s “Gypsy Love Song,” which in turn is based on Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E minor, Op. 11. Our interpretation of “Kary’s Trance” extends this chain of contrafacts and sends the music into unexpected modal regions. The third selection, Tadd Dameron’s “On a Misty Night,” features a more traditional treatment of the tune with subtle harmonic and rhythmic displacements. Our rendition of “Line Up,” which itself is an unusual contrafact on “All of Me,” juxtaposes the interactive elements of our playing with a straight ahead unison statement of the iconic solo by Lennie Tristano. Interpreting ballads enables saxophonists to engage the color palette at their fingertips, which can range from whispers and sighs to growls and cries. Our version of “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” by David Mann and Bob Hilliard, exudes these expressive qualities. In keeping with the tradition of contrafacts, “It’s You and Me” is an original on “It’s You or No One,” and also combines harmonic and rhythmic elements heard in Konitz’s “It’s You.” One of our favorite jazz classics, Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance,” blends a beautiful melody with attractive harmonic twists, and nicely lends itself to our interactive treatment. The mood of the album darkens with an original composition, “Final Breaths,” in which areas of tension and release in the harmonic progression complement the lilting, bittersweet melody. The next two selections are arrangements of Alban Berg’s “Schlafend Trägt Man Mich” and Violin Concerto. Berg saturated his early compositions with extreme chromaticism and boldly pushed the limits of the tonal system. Our reharmonization of the song, “Opus 2 No. 2,” pushes those limits further while preserving the melody in its original form. Bearing the famous dedication, To the memory of an angel, his Violin Concerto features a dodecaphonic melody, which cleverly explores the dichotomy between tonal elements and serial compositional procedures. The adaptation of the concerto, “Angel’s Lament,” conveys the unimaginable feeling of losing a loved one through intense chromaticism and twelve-tone improvisation. We chose to close the album on a lighter note with a lesser-known standard by Donald Kahn and Stanley Styne, “A Beautiful Friendship,” which perfectly summarizes our collaboration. We hope that your listening experience will be as gratifying as ours while recording these selections. Alexa Tarantino & Dariusz Terefenko, December 2014