Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard, Steve Swallow

CD version. Andando el Tiempo is an album of new compositions by Carla Bley for the trio she has shared for more than twenty years with saxophonist Andy Sheppard and bass guitarist Steve Swallow. It was released in May 2016, around her 80th birthday. Its centre is a three-part title suite about the trials of recovery from addiction, which moves from sorrow towards hope. The trio has no drums, and the music is restrained, melodic and full of small surprises.

This was the second ECM album by the trio after Trios (2012), which revisited older Bley pieces; this time all the music is new. Bley plays piano, Sheppard tenor and soprano saxophones, and Swallow his five-string electric bass. Bley has described her writing for this group as reduced big band music. As with Trios, the session took place at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, in November 2015, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. Stefano Amerio was the engineer and Manfred Eicher produced.

The suite's first two movements, Sin Fin and Potación de Guaya, share a haunting melody of slowly changing two-note phrases over a pulse close to tango. Camino al Volver brings the suite to a brighter close, and J.D. Considine in DownBeat heard the whole as a Spanish-tinged narrative. In Saints Alive!, which Bley compares to old ladies gossiping on a porch in the cool of the evening, a ticking piano figure supports Swallow's inventive lines. Naked Bridges/Diving Brides takes its title from a poem by Paul Haines. Bley wrote it as a wedding present for Sheppard and his wife, and her solo quotes Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March.

Critics stressed the balance among the three players, none of whom pushes for star solos. In BBC Music Magazine, which gave five stars, Barry Witherden called it "music for the heart and mind rather than the feet and viscera". Nate Chinen in The New York Times described it as "chamberlike and willowy, suffused with melancholy". DownBeat also gave five stars, with Considine noting how strongly Bley plays here, so that some passages feel collectively improvised rather than charted.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2487, released on 6 May 2016.