It’s often overlooked, at least in discussions about the music’s intellectual complexity, but one of the loveliest things about jazz is its social nature. Yes, some groups are put together to capture a certain sound, but many more are formed because the players like hanging out with each other—on and off the bandstand. And so it was for the duo of clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi and pianist Anat Fort: a chance encounter led to a friendship, then to a concert together, and from there to a brilliant new recording and the international tour that will bring them to the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival this weekend.

“If you want to hear how we met, it was at the Novara jazz festival in Italy,” Fort explains, in a Skype interview from her home in Tel Aviv. “We were both playing there, and we just met in the lobby of the hotel. He doesn’t know a lot of English, but we communicated somehow, and the next thing we knew we were playing a concert together in the same place. That’s how it started.”

Fort, of course, already knew Trovesi’s music. The 72-year-old Italian is one of the most distinguished jazz artists in Europe, with recording projects that include works inspired by William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the compositions of Kurt Weill. And she presumably had an inkling that his clarinet would work well with her piano when they entered the studio to make the recently released Birdwatching.

“With Gianluigi we didn’t have a lot of time to kind of cook this thing slowly, so we had to try a lot of things,” the pianist says. “I brought a lot of options because I wasn’t sure, exactly, what would work. And I also wasn’t sure that it would be just the alto clarinet, because he had the other instruments [saxophone and soprano clarinet] with him too. But as we were doing this, that sort of became the sound of the record.”

On Birdwatching, Trovesi’s dark tone and singing melodies pair perfectly with Fort’s similarly lyrical piano; one of the record’s chief pleasures lies in hearing how well the 46-year-old keyboardist sets up a supportive environment for the veteran clarinetist. And local audiences will get a second chance to hear her abilities as an accompanist, when she takes time off from her new friendship to revisit one of her oldest musical collaborations. Ayelet Rose Gottlieb’s appearance with Fort at the 2013 jazz festival marked the singer’s first major appearance in her adopted home, and the two plan to reprise the pleasure, with an album’s worth of as-yet-unheard material in tow.

“We’ve been working together for many years, and we actually recorded a CD last year in Israel which hasn’t come out yet because everything had to wait for Birdwatching to have its turn,” Fort reveals. “The plan was to do an album of lullabies— but not what you would naturally think of as lullabies, more like our interpretation of what lullabies could be. I think we’re going to do a good chunk of that, and we’ll probably do some other stuff from our repertoire over the years.”

Prepare to be surprised, Fort adds: she and Gottlieb will be doing songs in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, as well as venturing out into the kind of improvised terrain that fast friends—old or new—do best.

Anat Fort performs with Ayelet Rose Gottlieb at Performance Works on Friday (July 1), and with Gianluigi Trovesi at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on Sunday (July 3), both as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.