Paul Bley

Los Angeles, 1958. Paul Bley is leading the band at the Hillcrest Club that briefly includes Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. In the same period he is playing free duets with a trumpeter from Saskatchewan, Herbie Spanier, one of Canada's first beboppers and his sideman since New York in 1954. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, this is where Bley began to play what would later be called free jazz. None of the duets made it to record.

Know Time is the belated document. It was taped at Studio Tempo in Montreal in August 1993, during the same visit that produced the solo Sweet Time and the duo Double Time with Jane Bunnett, and released by Justin Time in 1995. The third player is the Toronto percussionist Geordie McDonald, and the credits for his setup read like a museum inventory: Chinese gongs, African shakers, ice bells, temple blocks, Tibetan tingsha and damaru, doumbek, a Peruvian rain stick, a large ocean drum, plus a kit played with hands, brushes, sticks and mallets.

Thirteen pieces, most of them short, all collectively improvised. Spanier moves between trumpet, flugelhorn and piccolo trumpet. Bley plays the way he did in those years, with long silences, lines that stop in mid-thought, and a blues phrase that turns up when least expected. The Penguin Guide singled out McDonald as the wild card and noted that for all the talk of getting beyond song form, song is exactly what these miniatures keep finding.

Spanier died in 2001 and left very few records under his own name. This is the place to hear him with the pianist who knew him longest.

Japanese CD edition from Solid's Justin Time series.