A SINGULAR and unlikely pairing they are: a baritone saxophonist born in Detroit in 1967 when the sounds of Tamla Motown were at their apex, and a pianist from the Transylvanian village of Seaca in agricultural Romania, born in 1969, where he grew up listening to the folk music played by his family at weddings, birthdays and festivals.

Alex Harding started his musical life playing drums, then heard Grover Washington on the radio and switched to tenor saxophone at high school.

He gained a musical scholarship from the University of Massachusetts, then migrated to New York in 1993 and toured with a Haitian band before hugely influential stints with Muhal Richard Abrams, Lester Bowie, Oliver Lake and David Murray’s big band.

In 1994 he was a part of Julius Hemphill’s latest album At Dr King’s Table, playing his adopted baritone in a saxophone sextet.

A proud Detroiter, he continues to marvel at the sheer volume and quality of “artists, musicians, writers who come out of the blue-collar working-class culture” of his city.

Lucian Ban studied classical music at the Bucharest Music Academy (1992-95) before arriving in New York in 1999, where his musicianship had a powerful effect upon Harding, whose first two tracks on his debut album Freeflow (2001) were compositions by the Romanian.

Harding spoke so enthusiastically of him to CIMP label producer Bob Rusch that, after contacting Ban and hearing tapes of his work, the record boss invited Harding and Ban to record together. The first result was the 2002 duo album Somethin’ Holy.

The album is marked by both musicians’ tribute to the great bassist Wilber Morris (born in Los Angeles in 1937), veteran of many a CIMP session, who during this recording was struggling against his final illness. Invocation to Wilber is played with a hymnal, deeply reflective beauty and Driftin’, which follows, shows Harding alternatively breathy and guttural and as if he were organically a part of Ban’s lucid, narrative notes.

Their partnership is powerfully empathetic, just as intensely so when Harding turns to bass clarinet in Resonance, with Ban striding up and down his keys. Time for Trane/Night on Earth is a homage to the monumental tenorist lasting almost 20 minutes, composed by Ban with a moving melodic centre and the weight of Harding’s sound creating a Paul Robeson-like timbre, as if contrariness were at the heart of their uncanny unity.

This amalgam of the lyrical and the visceral is forged through African Blutopia and Duke Ellington’s African Flower, with Ban’s sublime subtlety inside every one of his lines.

The very next day the twosome became a quintet for the album Premonition, with the addition of altoist Erik Torrente, bassist Chris Dahlgren and drummer Damion Reid. The latter wrote that Ban’s compositions on the session “gave me a chance to cry without words.”

The pianist hits a groove from the outset of opener Harmology and Harding’s deep notes swing potently beside Dahlgren’s dynamic pulse. Reid’s drums are as structured thunder on Serenade for Andrew, where Harding’s solo matches his storm. Torrente, on his first recording, plays with a lucid radiance on the ballad At Last, in a colloquy with Harding.

Mutiny sounds as if all pillars are shaking with Harding’s rumbling fanfare and far-throated cries, the becalmed beauty of Chakra causes both horns to sing quiescently and Ban’s soft touch creates a bed of sound.

The album finishes with the up-tempo Collision Theory, where Reid’s muscled drums drive both Torrente and Harding to super-combustive blowing.

The 2005 album Tuba Project brings the virtuoso tuba man Bob Stewart, born in 1945 in South Dakota’s Sioux Falls, into the Ban-Harding mix, alongside Detroit tenorist JD Allen III and San Francisco drummer Derrek Phillips.

As they start off with Cajun Stomp, Stewart’s bouncing bass pulse gives a rampaging momentum. Allen leads the congregation for Hymn, Ban flies in Muhal’ Song and Harding goes even further skyward with his old maestro, while the 16 minutes of Bluesness Suite give all members solo freedoms. Veteran Stewart is in the lower depths of brilliance, making rousing subterranean partnership with Harding’s dark profundity.

The baritonist testifies eloquently with soulmate Allen through the church-like resonance of Spirit Take My Hand and Hieroglyphics sets the three horns loose above Reid’s dancing drumset and Ban’s springing keys.

This is a deep, delving album of many earthen beauties, a conjunction of the US and Romania entirely unexpected, powerfully surprising.