String Trio Of New York

LP version. Area Code 212 is the second album by the String Trio Of New York, the group that violinist Billy Bang, guitarist James Emery and bassist John Lindberg formed in New York in 1977, and the first of their records for Black Saint. Violin, guitar and double bass is a line-up with almost no repertoire behind it in jazz, so the three wrote their own, and each member signs two of the six pieces. The title is the telephone code of Manhattan, where the group was based, though the music was taped in Milan; their debut, First String, had come out in 1979.

The session took place on November 25 and 26, 1980 at Barigozzi Studio in Milan, with Giancarlo Barigozzi engineering and Giovanni Bonandrini producing. The sleeve thanks the Cooperativa Gran Serraglio of Turin for its help in the production, and the liner notes are by Lee Jeske. Side one opens with Lindberg's T'wixt C And D and his Strawberries, which at over nine minutes is the longest piece on the record. Bang's two pieces are Echovamp 1678, the shortest track at about five minutes, and Bang's Bounce. Emery's are Coho, which opens side two, and Abjunctinuity, which closes it. Lindberg kept T'wixt C And D in his repertoire: three months later, on February 27, 1981, he played it in two parts with his quintet at Cami Hall in New York, Bang again on violin, and that concert became the Black Saint album Dimension 5. The trio itself stayed together in this form through Common Goal and Rebirth Of A Feeling, both recorded at the same Milan studio, until Bang left in 1986.

This is a copy of the original 1981 Black Saint LP, catalogue number BSR 0048, on 140 gram vinyl: CAM Jazz, which now owns the label, describes it as original stock recently found in its vaults. Ducale lists it as 120048-1.