Stan Strickland and Josh Rosen take a wild ride at the Lilypad on Sunday, 10 December 2023.

In other news: it’s rainy out.

Frog and Toad is a remarkable children’s book series, created by writer and illustrator Arnold Lobel.

Volumes like “Frog and Toad Are Friends” (1970) and “Days With Frog and Toad” (1974), among others, chronicle the fastidious life & times of two well-dressed amphibians going about their life in a loving, good-natured, and civilized fashion.

The series has spawned a second-tier sort of fascination among social critics who cite the webbed wonders, who are the same sex, as a kind of prototypical representation of a homosexual relationship before such a thing found a foothold in popular culture. Who can decipher an author’s intent?

The author’s daughter, in any event, refers to the relationship as a “bromance.”

Josh Rosen and Stan Strickland have that Frog and Toad kind of vibe. Longtime musical collaborators, who regularly hang out at the faculty watercooler at Berklee College of Music. All they need is some Etsy-core fan art to seal the deal.

Josh Rosen

The pair performed solo sets before partnering up. Josh Rosen sat at the piano, wafting his oversized, untucked shirt behind him as he sat like a ducktailed virtuoso at Symphony Hall. On the menu for the evening was a collection of standards and originals. A piece by Bill Evans; an interpretation of the Bernstein classic “Somewhere (There’s A Place For Us)”; a new original; and more. A pint of what looked like a hazy IPA tided him over for the set.

Stan Strickland

Gil Aharon, pianist, teacher, and owner of the Lilypad, was in the house.

He was running a new recruit to the sound team through her paces. It seemed to be a special night, a recording night. Two microphones at centerstage captured the ambient sounds while other instrument-directed mics fed the player’s playing into the motherboard, and, likely, into the cloud.

The vocalist and wind instrumentalist Stan Strickland took note. Sizing up his vocal mic before his set started. There was a little distortion somewhere along the line, and he and Gill ironed out the kink in due course.

Strickland began his set with what could have passed for a purely yogic exercise of breath control. He channeled his respiration into streams, rivulets, and eddies until the aethereal liquid poured out into a kind of tributary, fed through a looper, that became the foundation for further improvisation on top. Layers and layers. Some of them pure breath, all of them pure breath. But also accompanied by a soprano saxophone here, a flute there, and a tenor saxophone for good measure.

And every so often, a vocal yelp.

Together, playing as a duo, Strickland and Rosen complemented each other swimmingly. Each took on a few of the characteristics the other had emphasized in his solo set.

From Strickland’s solo set, Rosen borrowed a little pattern smashing and a greater percussive quality, digging into the belly of his piano to knock the inner strings around without the intermediary of keys.

From Rosen’s solo set, Strickland borrowed a greater emphasis on theme and motive. Instead of layering up skywards, the flutist and saxophonist developed more forward evolution in the musical narrative – aided, as he was, by human accompaniment instead of the static looper.

And when they finished, they finished like the finish of a good afternoon tea.

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