Singer/saxophonist Nealand and pianist McDermott never cared too much about musical boundaries, so the set list for this duo album is about as eclectic as you’d hope. There’s Chopin, Carole King and Duke Ellington; a few familiar hits and a handful obscurities. Nor is it surprising that they often jump musical genres within the same track, or that that make the whole thing sound relatively effortless.

What is a little surprising is how confident a singer Nealand’s become, since she initially made her mark as an instrumentalist. But her last Royal Roses album closed with a Tom Waits song, “Day After Tomorrow,” whose lyric calls for a dramatic touch—the singer is a soldier who may or may not make his homecoming—and she nailed it. She returns to Waits here for “Take It With Me” and it’s a beautiful performance of a profoundly sad lyric. Both she and McDermott—who leaves plenty of space between the chords—resist the urge to overstate anything, embracing both the melody and the character’s broken heart.

Sprits are considerably higher elsewhere, with a version of Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” whose piano/horn exchanges are flat-out joyful. The pair manage to keep a balance between respecting a song and having some fun with it, doing a bit of the latter in Cole Porter’s “It’s All Right With Me,” where the lyric ad-libs (“Your face is so very…facial!”) fit the song’s flirtatious intent. Bessie Smith’s “Gimme a Pigfoot” is about as elegant as it’s ever sounded, and McDermott puts a few Fess-like touches into “City of New Orleans”—long overdue, since Arlo Guthrie’s famous version of the train song had no musical traces of the city. Like all good live albums, it makes you want to hit a show and see what else they’ve got up their sleeve.