After meeting at the Newport Jazz Festival four years ago, James Morrison and Marian Petrescu discovered they had an irrepressible musical chemistry.
"I never play better than when I play with Marian," Morrison says.
Petrescu agrees, saying their relationship is best explained by their "tension."
"We understand the language exactly how it has to be. It's not about what you know, but how you play," he says.
Petrescu learnt to play on his family's piano in Romania under Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.
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As a child, he would play along to music being on his family's record player. Later he discovered he was playing the records at the wrong speed, but by then he'd built up incredible dexterity that laid the foundations for his fleet-fingererd virtuosic style.
"It's not about what you know, but how you play."
"Marain's the only piano player I've known who says you have to play slowly to play fast," Morrison says. "If you can't play a good sound slowly, you can't play a good sound fast."
And they both laugh when asked where Petrescu gets his energy from.
"Marian doesn't take any performance-enhancing drugs because he's already crazy," Morrison says.
And Petrescu says he's found his musical match.
"I'm not a crazy man but a passionate man and I love to play with this man because he's the only one in the world who plays that way."
The pair has teamed up to record a new album in Australia and will tour nationally with singer Megan Washington from July.
