Ron Carter & Bill Frisell in New York

Ron Carter is an American jazz bassist and composer, born in 1937 in Ferndale, Michigan. He is best known for his work in Miles Davis’s 1960s quintet and can be heard on records including E.S.P., Miles Smiles and Nefertiti. His extensive studio career also includes Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage and Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil. In 1964, Carter toured Europe with Davis’s quintet, a period documented on Miles in Berlin. The group played Chicago’s Plugged Nickel in 1965, and those performances were later collected on The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965. Decades later, Carter celebrated his 85th birthday with a concert at Carnegie Hall in 2022. His own groups have played the Village Vanguard in New York, while his long relationship with Japanese audiences has brought him back to Blue Note Tokyo.

Bill Frisell is an American guitarist and composer, born in Baltimore in 1951 and raised in Denver. He plays jazz shaped by folk, country, rock and experimental music, and his best-known albums include Have a Little Faith, Nashville and Gone, Just Like a Train. The live double album East/West documents two trio engagements, one at the Village Vanguard in New York and one at Yoshi’s in Oakland. He returned to the first club for a duo engagement in 2016; recordings from those performances with bassist Thomas Morgan were released as Small Town and Epistrophy.