Paul+bley

Jimmy Giuffre, Paul Bley, and Steve Swallow had reunited four years prior to this recording session before a live and very enthusiastic audience. On this date, they had been touring together on and off for four years and were as telepathic as in 1961 when they recorded Fusion and Thesis with Creed Taylor at Verve (yeah, the same guy who aesthetically ruined Wes Montgomery and Grover Washington, Jr.)…

Through the latter half of the 20th century, an enduring cult figure in modern jazz was the Boston-based composer, academic, and pianist Ran Blake. In addition to his duties as the Chair of Contemporary Improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music, Blake has recorded sporadically, usually in solo or duo settings, creating a small but knotty category of near-abstract originals and quirky deconstructions of jazz standards. This is worth mentioning, because on first listen (if not second or third), the first solo album by bandleader/pianist Pandelis Karayorgis sounds startlingly like one of Ran Blake's solo records…