Paul Bley

Bamboo present the first ever reissue of Paul Bley's The Paul Bley Synthesizer Show, originally released in 1971. This stunning album was recorded over three sessions in New York City on December 9th, 1970, January 21st, 1971, and March 9th, 1971. The Paul Bley Synthesizer Show produces new songs and tough translations of previous works from Mr. Joy while joining the likes of other seminal works in 1972's Dual Unity (BAM 7018CD/LP), 1971's Improvisie (BAM 7019CD/LP), and Bley-Peacock Synthesizer Show's Revenge: The Greater The Love, The Bigger The Hate (1971). Featuring the songs of Annette Peacock, this collection sets another milestone in the abstract, free jazz spectrum and joins the above trilogy in celebrating an innovative and iconic figure. A classic piece of Paul Bley's work with synthesized free jazz in the 1970s – an essential release for fans of free jazz, fusion, and progressive music. Includes liners with interviews, background notes, and rare archival photos.

This recording features the legendary trio of pianist Paul Bley, bassist Steve Swallow, and drummer Barry Altschul from near the beginning of Bley's most innovative and creatively fertile period. For ESP-Disk's 50th Anniversary, they have remastered from the original tape.

Why aren't there more recordings like Fly Away Little Bird? Perhaps it's because there aren't more musicians of this stature. The studio reunion of the legendarily experimental Jimmy Giuffre 3 in 1992 was reissued in 2002 on the French Sunnyside label and is a radical departure from anything the trio had done in the past. These studio apparitions of the band are their most seamlessly accessible while being wildly exploratory. In addition to the consummate improvisations and compositions by Giuffre (title track, a redone "Tumbleweed"), the tender meditations by Steve Swallow ("Fits" and "Starts"), and the bottom-register contrapuntal improves by Paul Bley ("Qualude"), this is a trio recording that uses standards such as "Lover Man," a radically and gorgeously reworked "I Can't Get Started," "Sweet and Lovely," and "All the Things You Are" to state hidden textural possibilities inside chromatic harmony. There is never the notion of restraint in the slow, easy, and proactive way these compositions are approached.

On this unusual album, pianist Paul Bley's 1964 trio (with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian) is joined by tenor-saxophonist John Gilmore during his brief hiatus from Sun Ra's Arkestra. Unissued at the time (five of the eight numbers made their debut on Bley's IAI label), the music is explorative but not as free as one might expect. Best-known among the six Carla Bley originals (which are joined by Paul's "Turns") is the lyrical "Ida Lupino" which is heard in two versions. The music overall is quite stimulating and a bit offbeat, a reflection of Paul Bley's adventurous spirit.

Despite the fact that pianist and composer Paul Bley had been a renowned and innovative jazzman for nearly 20 years, 1973 saw the release of his most mature and visionary work. This is one of the most influential solo piano recordings in jazz history, and certainly one that defined the sound of the German label ECM. Consisting of seven tracks, five of which were composed by Carla Bley (his ex-wife) and Annette Peacock (soon to be his ex-wife), and two originals, Bley showcased his newfound penchant for the spatial pointillism and use of silence that came to define his mature work. In Carla Bley's "Ida Lupino," the pianist took the song's harmonics and unwound them from their source, deepening the blues elements, brushing the Errol Garnerish ostinato with pastoral shades and textures of timbral elegance, and reaching the tonic chords in the middle register just as he forced the improvisation just barely into the abstract with his right hand…