David Liebman

The Tree is a solo record in the strict sense: David Liebman alone with a soprano saxophone, no overdubs, no other instrument. He built it as a suite in six movements named after the parts of a tree, Roots, Trunk, Limbs, Branches, Twigs and Leaves, and then played the whole cycle a second time in reverse, so that the album climbs from the ground to the foliage and comes back down. By then the former Miles Davis saxophonist had recorded widely in groups and duos; here, for the length of an album, the soprano has no partner at all.

The session took place on April 24, 1990 at Barigozzi Studio in Milan, with Giancarlo Barigozzi engineering and Giovanni Bonandrini producing for Soul Note; Gennaro Carone mastered it and the cover is a painting by Susan Bradford. Twelve tracks of three to five minutes each add up to about fifty minutes. The first take of each movement runs from Roots - Take I to Leaves - Take I; the two versions of Leaves sit back to back at the centre of the record, and the second pass ends on a short Roots - Take II of under three minutes. Liebman kept the idea alive long after the session: at the Willisau festival in August 2004 he played The Tree: Roots, Limbs, Branches in a solo concert later issued by hatOLOGY as The Distance Runner.

This is the original Soul Note CD, catalogue number 121195-2, first released in 1991.