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 | Paul BleySweet TimeLabel: Justin Time | Jazz | April 5, 1994Format UPC Order # Unit Price |
Production Credits Photography by David Daly (on track 00) Graphic design by Graphic Junction (on track 00) Mastered by Bill Kipper (on track 00) Mastered at S.N.B. Mastering, Montréal (on track 00) Recorded at Studio Tempo, Montréal (on track 00) Mastered by Ian Terry (on track 00) Recorded by Ian Terry (on track 00) Piano tuning by Kazuya Tsujio (on track 00) Photography by Jim West (on track 00) Produced by Jim West (on track 00) | TracksNo Title Duration Excerpts 04 Sweet Time 00:07:05 05 Lost Love 00:06:04 06 Turquoise 00:07:26 07 Pointillist 00:03:38 08 Started 00:04:31 09 As Beautiful As The Moon 00:05:13 10 Finale 00:01:40 Liner NotesA River Runs Through ItIn the interest of Third Stream rhetoric, a colleague of mine once tried to convince me that pianists Paul Bley and Glenn Gould were separated at birth Maverick performers and composers both, these two enigmatic, quintessentially Canadian loners shared a predilection for the solo piano, a dislike for public performance, and Order of Canada status as eccentrics of the ivories. The details were just too coincidental to pass up: Gould required a dilapidated old chair to sit at the piano, Bley a particular US. telephone directory. Both were also given to uninhibited, rhapsodic singing in performance And most curious of ail, both were dawn to the possibilities of the newly-nested analogue synthesizer in the early 1970 Bley drew poetry from its patch bays with his then-partner Annette Peacock, while Gould once trumpeted Walter Carlos' 1968 Moog epic Switched On Bach as the record of the decade The more I thought about it, the more my colleague's Thud Stream simply didn't hold water. Yes, both pianists were obsessed with timer movements and structure of music, whether it was The Goldberg Variations or Carla Bley's Ida Lupino." Ripples on the surface, I said The real currents ran much deeper, and they couldn't be any more different For one, Gould has been all but canonized by the classical music establishment, while Bley unjustly remains a footnote to the free jazz movement Yet where the river really forks has to do with tempo. Gould was fond of playing Brahms Concerto Nel in D Minor as slow as molasses; to paraphrase the writer Jonathan Cott, tempo for Gould was not fixed, rather it was the glass into which musical water was poured No such tumblers left rings on Mr. Joy's piano, for jazz offers considerably more flexibility in the tempo department. It was the changes, rather than the tempo, that Paul Bley took liberty with. A fixture on Stanley Street and in the Laurentians throughout the 1950s, Paul Bley quickly ascended the jazz ladder, first jetting to New York and then settling into the Hillcrest Club on the West Coast at the end of the decade Bley fell in with the free thinkers -Ornette, Ayler, Mingus, who were trying to take jazz beyond the nec plus ultra of bebop embodied by Bud and Lennie Tristano. Yet even though Bley was in on the so-called "October Revolution" in New York's avant-garde, he kept his head above the tempest in the Five Spot that was free jazz, his cool restraint putting him in a distinct orbit like Cecil Taylor, Bley left the changes at the door; unlike Taylor, he melted the notes into nothingness. Key to Bley's abstract yet lyrical style was the notion of improvisation as spontaneous composition, a notion borne out by the laconic solos and almost incandescent clarity of mood he built up night after night from a mere handful of notes. Bley honed this automatic writing to diamond hardness in the Jimmy Giuffre 3, the drummerless trio and font of the river from which Bley continues to draw his unique solo piano work The CD you are holding in your hands is another dip in that river, and joins a long list of distinguished solo piano outings such as Open, To Love (ECM, 1972), Tears (Owl, 1984), and Changing Hands (Justin Time, 1991), albums which had even the most seasoned jazz scribes trawling Rogets section 590.4, and without which the aesthetics of solo piano, ECM-style, would probably not exist The tenuous flux between improvisation and composition can be heard in the six notes that open Never Again, notes that slowly unfold and cartwheel into a lush, snow-swept landscape reminiscent of the glorious free fall that was the Jimmy Giuffre 3. Only Ran Blake could make more out of this economy of means. In Pointillist, Bley brilliantly balances a pointillistic left hand with a lyrical, euphoric right before the jump cut to its calm, radiant coda Throughout the session, Bley continues to mine gold from the most minimal of motifs and themes. On the elliptical Sweet Time, he uses a fractured boogie-woogie figure as a springboard for his willfully stubborn stride, then imbues the song with timelessness by hesitating periodically, suspending chords and damping the strings. In the elegant gymnopaede of Turnham Bay, Bley layers the decay of the notes, creating billowing clouds out of the resulting overtones. And on Turquoise, he playfully stretches out on a blues as malleable and sour as salt-water taffee as he robustly leans into the lower register. In a 1970 CBC broadside entitled "The Psychology of Improvisation," Glenn Gould opined that This is the age of debatable motive, of concern with whether and to what degree our thoughts and our works derive from a conscious industry or result from concealed and unacknowledged desires, and the laity have long been convinced that the making of music is a game regulated by such arcane devices that they couldn't be expected to understand in any event." For Paul Bley, the real beauty of improvising lies in the concealed, the unacknowledged, the notes not played, the road not taken. The game of jazz shouldn't need to be fully understood to be enjoyed. Andrew Jones, April 1994 |
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