  We establish a version of Howe duality that involves a tensor product of
Verma modules. Surprisingly, this duality leaves the realm of lowest and
highest weight modules.
  We quantize this duality, and as an application, we prove that the (colored
higher) LKB representations arise from this duality and use this description to
show that they are simple as modules for the braid group and for various of its
subgroups, including the pure braid group.
