Despite the fact that pianist and composer Paul Bley had been a renowned and innovative jazzman for nearly 20 years, 1973 saw the release of his most mature and visionary work. This is one of the most influential solo piano recordings in jazz history, and certainly one that defined the sound of the German label ECM. Consisting of seven tracks, five of which were composed by Carla Bley (his ex-wife) and Annette Peacock (soon to be his ex-wife), and two originals, Bley showcased his newfound penchant for the spatial pointillism and use of silence that came to define his mature work. In Carla Bley's "Ida Lupino," the pianist took the song's harmonics and unwound them from their source, deepening the blues elements, brushing the Errol Garnerish ostinato with pastoral shades and textures of timbral elegance, and reaching the tonic chords in the middle register just as he forced the improvisation just barely into the abstract with his right hand, percussively slipping in one or two extra notes to highlight the deep lyricism in the tune's body. On his own "Started," Bley illustrates brazenly the deep influences of the Second Viennese School on his sense of harmony and counterpoint. Recalling Arnold Schöenberg's solo piano pieces in their engagement of dissonance and glissando placement, it's still Bley playing jazz and improvising, vamping on his own theme while turning melody and timbre back on themselves for the purpose of complete tonal engagement in the middle register.

And in Annette Peacock's "Nothing Ever Was, Anyway," which closes the album, Bley makes full use of an element he employs throughout the recording: space and its ability to create the notion of consonance or dissonance from the simplest of melodies. Here notes appear, related, but just barely, to one another in a more or less linear sequence, and Bley stretches that connection to the breaking point by using his sense of spatial relationship in harmony to silence. He elongates the tonal sustain and allows it to bleed into his next line just enough, as if it were a ghostlike trace of another melody, a another distant lyric, attempting to impose itself on the present one, though it had just since ceased to exist. Ultimately, what Bley offers is jazz pianism as a new kind of aural poetics, one that treats the extension of the composer's line much as the poet treats the line as the extension of breath. Sheer brilliance.

by Thom Jurek

It was said that Paul Bley could make a concert grand sound like an upright. That’s not true of Open, To Love, which sounds as sumptuous as its contemporary ECM studio classics, Chick Corea’s Piano Improvisations and Keith Jarrett’s Facing You. The 1973 album features songs by Carla Bley and Annette Peacock, plus two Paul Bley contrafacts (compositions built on the chord sequences of existing songs) and is mostly reflective. The highlight is Carla Bley’s “Ida Lupino”, dedicated to the British born Hollywood actor and film maker. Bley was a professed “nonpractiser” but the arpeggiated rolls here must have been practised – even if over years of performances. This is probably the greatest Bley interpretation of a gorgeous, enchanting ballad that he made his own. “Started” and “Harlem” are in the familiar Cool School tradition of contrafacts, in this case of the standards “I Can’t Get Started” and “Drop Me Off In Harlem”.

On Floater And Syndrome, unfortunately, Bley really is on a – not great – upright piano, with Steve Swallow (bass) and Pete La Roca (drums). La Roca is a great but underrated drummer, whose finest hour was on Sonny Rollins’s 1959 In Stockholm set. Poor piano tone and less than stellar recording quality are the main issues with these two earlier albums, recorded in 1962–63 but only released in the 1980s by Savoy Jazz. Compositions are by Paul Bley and Carla Bley, and again these yield both free and lyrical approaches.

Sound aside, results are still variable. Carla’s comments, quoted in the sleevenotes, help explain why. Composing for her husband “wasn’t my idea. I had my own kind of music where I wasn’t writing for him and “Ida Lupino” would come out… mostly he wanted stuff to play free on... I thought free improvising could be… fun to play. But it needed something to ground it a little bit.” The tracks from the later session are more rewarding, especially the ballads, which are contrafacts. Andy Hamilton