Swiss pianist Leo Tardin conceived Grand Pianoramax as a duo on wheels in a sense. Certainly the plan was for piano/keyboards with drums, but from the beginning he considered the project as an interactive base that invited collaborations -- as just one example, Deantoni Parks on drum kit and Tardin with his grand piano, Rhodes, miniMoog, and K-Station are collaborators with Detroit rapper Invincible. And Tardin and Parks are looking for ways to skitter through genres, not wrapping them in one another and not merely juxtaposing them. While their debut album was quite compelling, this sophomore effort is where it all comes to gel. The Biggest Piano in Town features the duo with Mike Ladd and Invincible on a cut each, but also rapper Spleen and poet Celena Glenn together on one, and Marko Djordjevic doing a voice-over elsewhere. Interspersed are funky, flipped-out, beat-heavy tracks that pop, swagger, and strut across everything from post-bop jazz to hip-hop to electronic music, all the while staying in the pocket enough to be accessible as well as innovative. Grand Pianoramax carve a stubborn and sharp niche for themselves. On "Showdown," with Ladd, delays are employed on the Rhodes as Tardin and Parks set a knotty little breakbeat-laden groove with plenty of funky lines that walk the knife edge. Ladd comes in with his poem about being a superhero who looks OK cool, but his arch enemy is clearly stylin' higher. He may have superhero powers, but his arch enemy can hear people having sex. A battle ensues, and the music responds with something approaching song, which eventually gets to Ladd, who translates his spoken word attack to accommodate the bridge in the melody and weave his words through it. Think Gil Scott-Heron and Richard Pryor meeting Hampton Hawes and Kraftwerk.