String Trio Of New York

LP 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 side one, and his Common Goal, about six minutes long, sits in the middle of side two and gives the record 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 first opening side two and the second closing it 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 a copy of the original 1982 Black Saint LP, catalogue number BSR 0058, 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 120058-1.