Bley

Paul Bley's jazz career has been marked by a burning creative restlessness continually leading to new musical discoveries. An earlier book about Bley, Stopping Time, was a collaborative effort matching Bley the grand raconteur with writer David Lee. Time Will Tell repeats that formula,this time with jazz academic and journalist Norman Meehan, although with strikingly more success. Bley's storytelling about himself and his inspired and inspiring fellow musicians (Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Sonny Rollins)is marked by both intelligent admiration and disarming candor. His love/hate relationship with pianist Bill Evans is wonderfully illuminated through Bley's detailed description of a recording session they shared creating George Russell's complex Jazz In The Space Age album. Quite unsparing of his ruthlessly competitive spirit toward other pianists, he admits thinking of Evans, "I'm going to knock this guy out, and he's going to sound bad," only finding that Evans in his own sweet way elevated his playing to the point where Bley met his match.

Composer and pianist Carla Bley has been very consistent, if not exactly prolific, for most of her 40 years in jazz. When she and bassist/life partner Steve Swallow hired British saxophonist Andy Sheppard – then one of his country's young lions as both a composer and as a reedman – in 1989, they hired him on and he's been with the group ever since. The recorded evidence was heard on Sheppard's first appearance with Bley on the utterly beguiling Fleur Carnivore, and later on the fine trio recording Songs with Legs in 1995. Drummer Billy Drummond joined the unit as a permanent member in the early part of this century, and on 2004's Lost Chords debut, locked in with a unit that seemed to be evenly weighted all around.

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.

After years spent emphasizing her compositions and bandleading abilities, in the late '80s, Carla Bley finally started featuring her own piano playing to a much greater degree. A melodic but explorative player, Bley (whose use of space sometimes recalls Thelonious Monk) interacts closely with the electric bass of Steve Swallow on this excellent duet session, performing six of her originals and two of Swallow's. ~Scott Yanow, rovi