Jim Hall & Ron Carter

Guitar and bass, nothing else

Jim Hall was born James Stanley Hall on December 4, 1930 in Buffalo, New York, raised in Cleveland, and studied composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Ron Carter, born May 4, 1937 in Ferndale, Michigan, took up the cello at ten, switched to bass at Cass Technical High School, and played in the Miles Davis quintet from 1963 to 1968. Hall said in a 2008 interview that he met Carter through the trumpeter Art Farmer, in whose group both played around 1960 to 1962, and that in the mid-to-late 1960s he called Carter and they began performing duets, helped by a similar classical training. Hall's trio with Tommy Flanagan and Carter dates to 1962 by Wikipedia's account.

Alone Together was recorded live on August 4, 1972 at the Playboy Club in New York and released on Milestone in 1973, produced by Dick Katz; it reached 33 on Billboard's jazz albums. After about a decade they reunited, and Live at Village West (recorded November 1982, released by Concord Jazz in 1984) and Telephone (recorded August 1984 at Concord Pavilion, released 1985) followed; the two were combined as the CD Telepathy in 2001. The Christian Science Monitor reviewed their 1983 run at the Village West club in New York, where Hall called the format kind of fragile and said Carter gets inside your brain. Every duo album is guitar and bass only.

Hall received the NEA Jazz Masters award in 2004, the first modern jazz guitarist so honored. Carter is credited with the most recordings of any jazz bassist, 2,221 by the 2015 Guinness count on his site. Hall died on December 10, 2013, aged 83, while planning a January 2014 duo tour of Japan with Carter. Pat Metheny called him one of the most important improvising guitarists in jazz history. Carter's 2014 tribute album is In Memory of Jim.