Part of the issue with phrasing my opinion of the CD is: how can you write about something like two pianists in a live setting bouncing off of each other? Unlike Corea's 2007 duet with Bela Fleck, The Enchantment, this double-album was recorded live at the Tokyo Blue Note. In a studio jazz setting, even if all of the takes are recorded with all instruments at once, it's still possible to pick the best take for an album; in the live setting, there's no way to bring it back, and there's also a lot more energy from the crowd and from the musicians playing off each other.

With that in mind, and comparing it to the difference between The Enchantment and Corea and Fleck's live performance, Duet is relatively restrained. The pieces go on for long times--the shortest piece, "The Fool on the Hill," clocks in at just under 7 minutes, and the longest is barely shy of 15--but in there are very few places that feel self-indulgent. The end of "Humpty-Dumpty," for instance, has a section which is basically a flurry of notes from both pianists with little semblance of harmonic structure, and on "Summertime," the melody is only followed closely enough to remind the listener what the song is. There are a few songs which are attention-grabbing, such as "The Fool on the Hill" with a percussive groove (my first reaction was "pianos can make a sound like that?"), or the funky "Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are (Bolivar Blues)."