Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard, Steve Swallow

CD version. Life Goes On is a set of three new suites by the pianist and composer Carla Bley, written for her long-standing trio with saxophonist Andy Sheppard and bassist Steve Swallow. On ECM it follows Trios (2013) and Andando el Tiempo (2016). The music is spare and melodic, with Bley's dry humour never far away, and the trio plays it with a quiet, unforced togetherness.

The associations go back a long way. Swallow first recorded Bley's music in 1961, when she was writing for Jimmy Giuffre's trio, and the trio with Sheppard was in its 25th year when this album appeared. Bley plays piano, Sheppard tenor and soprano saxophones, and Swallow his electric bass guitar. The album was recorded in May 2019 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing.

The title suite opens with a slow, plain twelve-bar blues that Bley wrote while recovering from illness. Its four parts are called Life Goes On, On, And On and And Then One Day, and the last ends with Bley's chords slowing as Sheppard's phrases dissolve. Beautiful Telephones takes its title from a remark attributed to a newly elected US president on first seeing the White House. In it Bley slips in fragments of Hail to the Chief and other patriotic tunes, closing on the last bars of My Way. The closing suite runs from After You through the seventeen-second Follow The Leader to Copycat. There each line is meant to echo or vary the one before, so the three players keep completing each other's thoughts.

Paul de Barros gave the album five stars in DownBeat, praising Bley's "deft sense of dramatic development" and the trio's "deadpan minimalism". Garry Booth's BBC Music Magazine review was also a five-star one. In The Guardian, John Fordham placed it in "an unhurried sequence of disorientatingly moving trio recordings". Several critics, John Bungey in The Times among them, heard Monk and Satie in Bley's piano.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2669, first released on 14 February 2020.