Saxophonist James Brandon Lewis is steeped in gospel, schooled in jazz and released his debut album with Gerald Cleaver and William Parker in 2014. Drummer Chad Taylor is equally widely versed and came to notice with Marc Ribot's 2005 Spiritual Unity homage to free jazz icon Albert Ayler. Here they condense, reconstruct and explore a swathe of jazz history in a thrilling festival-finale performance from last year's Willisau Jazz Festival.

The album opens with Lewis constructing an epic of growls, phonics and quarter-tone runs from the bare-bones theme of ‘Twenty Four’, a distant splice of John Coltrane's ‘Giant Steps’ and ‘26-2’ according to the sleeve.

The Coltrane references continue with ‘Radiance’ expanding the melodic warmth of Coltrane's ‘Seraphic Light’ into visceral free jazz. And later in the set, the haunting ‘With Sorrow Lonnie’ finds Lewis quoting ‘Lonnie's Lament’ as the performance unfolds.

Elsewhere, Ellington's ‘Come Sunday’ is sweetly delivered over the chimes of Taylor's mbira, Mal Waldron's ‘Watakushi No Sekai’ sashays over twisted mambo beats and the encore, ‘Over/Under the Rainbow,’ reconfigures a well-worn theme into architectural magnificence. The duo is at its most trenchant on the album's two originals, but even here the passion and power of jazz expressionism is moderated by heart-on-sleeve melody and Taylor's sense of time.

Willisau Jazz Festival has a history of recording heavyweight sax/drum duos in their prime.

The late Max Roach recorded a brace here in 1979 – One in Two, Two in One featured Anthony Braxton; The Long March, Archie Shepp – and Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell played the following year. A fine-tuned cover of Redman's ‘Willisee’ references that memorable event on this album's penultimate track. Deeply personal and equally intense, it won Lewis and Taylor an encore, and confirmed that in direct comparison, they measure up.