Early example of Bley-Jarrett Connection?

[Pete C]

I'm listening to Bley's s/t 1954 Emarcy album. It struck me while listening to "There Will Never Be Another You" that Bley's attack and phrasing here is very much reminiscent of some of Jarrett's standards trio approach...

[Guy Berger]

Jarrett's on record saying that as a budding jazz pianist he loved Bley's trio recordings.

[clifford_thornton]

Yeah, Life Between the Exit Signs is a very Bley-esque LP.

[Pete C]

Interestingly, while Bley's earliest trios don't sound that much like later Bley, I did hear this connection on that track with Jarrett, so I guess the basis of the Bley sound was in there somewhere back in '54. I'm guessing that Jarrett was listening to the early '60s Bley trios as a young player rather than anything pre-Giuffre.

[CraigP]

I like Bley's work, but to me he doesn't have as distinctive a sound as Jarrett. I have trouble recognizing Bley when I hear a track without knowing who it is.

[JSngry]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPLzROy7-Q4

Bley starts @ 3:15. Add some moans...

[Pete C]

Bley has been known to "vocalize," but not as egregiously.

[Mark Stryker]

I know this is a Bley-Jarrett thread but, Jesus, the solo Sonny plays after Bley on "All the Things You Are" is unreal. Totally cubist in the way it breaks the tune into parts and recombines ideas to portray the "object" from every angle at once -- from the opening trilling figure that sounds as disconnected from the tune as you can imagine to the way the stutters that comprise the meat of the first two choruses keep jabbing the form with a pick ax and then the increasing references to the harmony in the third and fourth chorus combined with these odd tangents that zoom completely out of orbit and the final reconciliation in the the bridge and last "A" of that last chorus where he locks most clearly into the basic structure but uses the same rhythmic phrasing from the more abstract part of the solo.

Amazing.

Edited March 8, 2012 by Mark Stryker

[Mark Stryker]

Back to our regularly scheduled programming ...

Here's Jarrett responding to Ethan Iverson's prompt to talk about Bley in a long 2009 interview at Do The Math. Complete interview here: http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/interview-with-keith-jarrett.html

KJ: Paul took the piano and made it impossible to disregard as a horn. And that made me feel good, because I was feeling ... I always liked piano-less groups, you know? I didn’t actually like the piano, for a long, long time. (I’m making up with it now.) But Paul was in my apartment in Boston, playing his Footloose! album before it was released, and we met in the club. An important force. Yeah, important.

EI: That solo on “All the Things You Are,” on the Sonny Rollins record.

KJ: Yeah. Well, that whole record, anyway. That’s crazy. My youngest son asked me, “Can you record all the things you think I should hear?” One of the first things that popped into my mind about what he had to hear was that album. Pete and Paul, and Steve and Pete together, made Footloose! extremely important for me. Sort of like Ahmad with certain kinds of drugs.

EI: Also on that record he plays a solo piano version of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” that was light years ahead of where everybody else was thinking about at that moment.

KJ: Yeah, one thing I’m sorry about is that he doesn’t still play on his cheap, broken down piano in his living room. Because that’s the best I ever heard him. And when he’s playing the Bosendorfers, or whatever he plays, I think, “No, no, Paul, don’t do that! It’s not gonna work. Where’s your sound? It’s not in that piano.”

Edited March 8, 2012 by Mark Stryker

[clifford_thornton]

Thanks for that, Mark. The last quote is kind of priceless.