String Trio Of New York

CD version. Common Goal is the third album by the String Trio Of New York, violinist Billy Bang, guitarist James Emery and bassist John Lindberg, recorded in Milan almost exactly a year after Area Code 212 and again for Black Saint. The group had formed in New York in 1977 around a line-up with little repertoire behind it, and here too the music is entirely their own: each member wrote two of the six pieces. The palette is a little wider than on the first Black Saint date, with Emery adding soprano guitar and Bang a Japanese yokobue flute and a gong.

The trio recorded on November 12 and 13, 1981 at Barigozzi Studios in Milan, engineered by Giancarlo Barigozzi and produced by Giovanni Bonandrini, with liner notes by Nat Hentoff and a cover photograph by Vittorio Sacco. Lindberg's Multiple Reason opens the record and his Common Goal, about six minutes long, gives it its title. Bang wrote Space Walk, at nearly eight minutes the longest piece, and San San Nana. Emery's Between The Lines and Extensions And Exceptions complete the set, the second of them closing the album at seven and a half minutes. Between this session and the previous one Bang and Lindberg had also played together outside the trio, at Lindberg's quintet concert at Cami Hall in New York in February 1981, released by Black Saint as Dimension 5. The same three returned to Milan in November 1983 for Rebirth Of A Feeling, and Bang left the group in 1986.

This is the Black Saint CD 120058-2, which Discogs lists as a reissue of the album first released on LP in 1982 as BSR 0058, with the six tracks of the original.