String Trio Of New York

First String is the debut of the String Trio Of New York, recorded in Milan in June 1979 for Black Saint by violinist Billy Bang, guitarist James Emery and bassist John Lindberg. The group came out of the jazz scene of the Lower East Side in 1977: Emery and Lindberg started as a duo in small venues, Bang heard them and asked to sit in, and the trio took shape from there. The record holds three long pieces, one composed by each member, and it set the terms of a band that kept the same name, with Emery and Lindberg at its core, long after Bang left in 1986.

The session was taped at Barigozzi Studios in Milan, engineered by Giancarlo Barigozzi and produced by Giacomo Pellicciotti. Emery plays guitar, soprano guitar and mandolin, which gives the trio a second high voice next to the violin. Emery and Lindberg already knew the label and the city: a year earlier they had recorded Junk Trap in Milan with Charles Bobo Shaw's Human Arts Ensemble. Lindberg's The East Side Suite opens the record and takes almost twenty minutes, a suite named after the neighbourhood the group came from. Bang's Subway Ride With Giuseppi Logan follows at eight minutes, and Emery's Catharsys In Real Time closes at nine. Without drums or piano, every role in the music, line, harmony and pulse, has to be carried by the three string players.

This is the Black Saint CD 120031-2 of the album first released in 1979, which Discogs lists as a reissue, with the three original pieces.