So, we have Braxton the "scientist/mathematician" and Smith the "organic/spiritual" guy - and I don’t mean these as put-downs. If one wanted to be reductive, one could look at these guys that way, wondering how they might get together musically - but they’d played/recorded together before in the early AACM (the Chicago collective the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) days, where they’d first made their bones.