Bill Bruford, Patrick Moraz

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (small sticker removal damage and tag on back)

Two years after Music For Piano And Drums, Bruford and Moraz reconvened. Flags, released on EG Records in 1985, is the second and final duo album. The setup is essentially the same: Patrick Moraz on acoustic grand, sometimes prepared, sometimes treated through subtle effects; Bill Bruford on kit augmented by Simmons electronic pads. The vocabulary has expanded, though. Where the first album insisted on real-time duet, Flags allows itself overdubs, layered percussion, more compositional shape.

The opener "Split Seconds" is a three-and-a-half-minute ostinato study, Moraz alternating cascading right-hand figures and held bass clusters while Bruford works the pads as a melodic instrument. "Blue Brains" is a 6/8 lurch with piano fed through what sounds like ring modulation. "Newton Plumbs The Depths" makes a fugue out of an unresolved cadence; "Symbiosis" is the closest the album gets to song form. Throughout, the playing is unhurried, the dynamics careful, the conversations dense without ever crowding the frame. Keith Jarrett comparisons remain inevitable but flatter both parties.

The original vintage EG pressing on EGLP 63 in gatefold sleeve. Flags never had the cult of Music For Piano And Drums but rewards in different ways: it is the album where the two musicians stopped trying to argue for the format and simply played inside it.