Paul Bley 3 at Birdland

[brownie]

From The New York Times today.

3 JAZZMEN, OBSTINATE AND WILY

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: August 24, 2007

The bassist Gary Peacock, the pianist Paul Bley and the drummer Paul Motian opened their week at Birdland on Wednesday and quickly slipped into a funny ritual of cussedness.

About an hour long, the set superficially resembled a normal jazz-club performance: about a half-dozen songs, ballads, blues, standards, free improvisation and applause in the right places. The signposts were there, but it was as if they had been uprooted, turned around and put upside down. A song turned out not to be a song, or ended without fanfare, or showed no organized routine of theme and variations, or showed more wiliness than you thought was there.

All three musicians came up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when most assumptions about jazz became deeply suspect. One of those assumptions — and these musicians, in particular, overturned it — was that a piano trio is a leader with two accompanists.

All three were involved in music that subsequently served as blueprints for advancing jazz. Back then Mr. Peacock made his blueprints with Mr. Bley, Albert Ayler and Bill Evans; Mr. Bley with Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Giuffre; Mr. Motian with Bill Evans. They don’t play together as a trio much anymore, and the challenge for them now is how to stay obstinate, how not to sound like their own blueprint.

This is a cooperative trio, but Mr. Bley was the music’s prompter and also the one musician who battled against the music most, or retreated farthest from it. He started off each piece of music with a slow, deliberate melody, usually ad-libbed. And most of what followed (except for a version of Sonny Rollins’s “Pent-Up House” and a little decontextualized chunk of “I Can’t Get Started”) was freely improvised interaction, even if it didn’t sound that way.

Mr. Bley seized on wisps of familiar language: a ballad’s chord progression, a bebop line or a beautiful blues phrase. Each of these moments lasted long enough to change the temperature of the music but not long enough to reveal itself as a particular song. He used these moments as connecting pieces and kept going forward. Or sometimes he didn’t go forward at all; sometimes he played a short, percussive phrase that stemmed his flow entirely, then fell silent.

Mr. Peacock listened hard and followed the arc of Mr. Bley’s quickly changing harmonies. He kept the band regular, more or less, with big, clean notes, tracing a clear shape through the music, even playing walking eighth notes where it needed shoring up.

Mr. Motian maintained a steady pulse, with constantly varying meter. His playing can have a poker face, a fascinating lack of affect, and here he used it brilliantly. He never busied up the music or acted as manic accompanist.

Even as he maintained steady swing patterns on his cymbals — and, given a tune, strictly followed the melody and structure of “Pent-Up House” — he didn’t respond to the usual prompts. He dumped the received wisdom and just played what he thought appropriate. There is a standard language of dynamics and ornament in jazz drumming, and when you hear someone ignore all that, it can be spooky.

The Gary Peacock/Paul Bley/Paul Motian trio continues through Saturday night at Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, Clinton, (212) 581-3080.

[clifford_thornton]

I guess this was the week to visit NY, huh.

[alocispepraluger102]

From The New York Times today.

3 JAZZMEN, OBSTINATE AND WILY

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: August 24, 2007

The bassist Gary Peacock, the pianist Paul Bley and the drummer Paul Motian opened their week at Birdland on Wednesday and quickly slipped into a funny ritual of cussedness.

About an hour long, the set superficially resembled a normal jazz-club performance: about a half-dozen songs, ballads, blues, standards, free improvisation and applause in the right places. The signposts were there, but it was as if they had been uprooted, turned around and put upside down. A song turned out not to be a song, or ended without fanfare, or showed no organized routine of theme and variations, or showed more wiliness than you thought was there.

All three musicians came up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when most assumptions about jazz became deeply suspect. One of those assumptions — and these musicians, in particular, overturned it — was that a piano trio is a leader with two accompanists.

All three were involved in music that subsequently served as blueprints for advancing jazz. Back then Mr. Peacock made his blueprints with Mr. Bley, Albert Ayler and Bill Evans; Mr. Bley with Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Giuffre; Mr. Motian with Bill Evans. They don’t play together as a trio much anymore, and the challenge for them now is how to stay obstinate, how not to sound like their own blueprint.

This is a cooperative trio, but Mr. Bley was the music’s prompter and also the one musician who battled against the music most, or retreated farthest from it. He started off each piece of music with a slow, deliberate melody, usually ad-libbed. And most of what followed (except for a version of Sonny Rollins’s “Pent-Up House” and a little decontextualized chunk of “I Can’t Get Started”) was freely improvised interaction, even if it didn’t sound that way.

Mr. Bley seized on wisps of familiar language: a ballad’s chord progression, a bebop line or a beautiful blues phrase. Each of these moments lasted long enough to change the temperature of the music but not long enough to reveal itself as a particular song. He used these moments as connecting pieces and kept going forward. Or sometimes he didn’t go forward at all; sometimes he played a short, percussive phrase that stemmed his flow entirely, then fell silent.

Mr. Peacock listened hard and followed the arc of Mr. Bley’s quickly changing harmonies. He kept the band regular, more or less, with big, clean notes, tracing a clear shape through the music, even playing walking eighth notes where it needed shoring up.

Mr. Motian maintained a steady pulse, with constantly varying meter. His playing can have a poker face, a fascinating lack of affect, and here he used it brilliantly. He never busied up the music or acted as manic accompanist.

Even as he maintained steady swing patterns on his cymbals — and, given a tune, strictly followed the melody and structure of “Pent-Up House” — he didn’t respond to the usual prompts. He dumped the received wisdom and just played what he thought appropriate. There is a standard language of dynamics and ornament in jazz drumming, and when you hear someone ignore all that, it can be spooky.

The Gary Peacock/Paul Bley/Paul Motian trio continues through Saturday night at Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, Clinton, (212) 581-3080.

thanks