A relatively little-heard but canonical classic of the solo jazz piano repertoire, Paul Bley’s ‘Open, to love’ forms a vital part of what amounted to producer Manfred Eicher’s quest to find a particular acoustic setting for an instrument that was then very rarely played on its own on jazz recordings. As Greg Buium’s revealing sleeve notes for this new release on ECM’s Luminessence audiophile vinyl imprint tell us, Eicher had a year previously recorded Chick Corea at the Arne Bendiksen Studio in Oslo, for what became the two volumes of ‘Piano Improvisations’. Pleased with the results, Eicher then wrote to a young Keith Jarrett , who visited the studio to make his own first solo recording, released as ‘Facing You’.

Both Corea and Jarrett were admirers of Canadian pianist Bley, who Eicher thought could form a kind of bridge between them. ”Paul was for me the most influential piano player in this time”, Eicher is quoted as saying, “and I was eager to one day work with him”. Accordingly, Eicher wrote to Bley, who after thinking the offer over, accepted and arrived at the Bendiksen studio on September 11,1972, bringing a bag of compositions with him. It was the same room and the same Steinway piano as with Corea and Jarrett, but Bley immediately created a quite startlingly different sound, which necessitated for Eicher a change of methodology, he and engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug adjusting the microphones to get closer to the strings. “The music was so unheard of that I had to emphasise everything to keep that focus”, Eicher remembered.

It is, it has to be said, a most unusual record, even 53 years later. I’d never heard it before and since receiving the LP have played it perhaps thirty times, and I’m still trying to understand what Bley is doing. Unlike most solo piano – and very unlike Jarrett’s ‘Koln Concert’ – there is notably little play with dynamics of velocity or volume and absolutely no showboating. Bley had joked that he was at that time trying to be “the slowest pianist in the world”, and ‘Open, to love’ certainly partially fulfils that brief. Over two LP sides, which correspond to two suites of music, although the separate numbers are not usually run together, Bley creates a masterful sense of oneness with the instrument, whose overtones and ringing decays achieve a chordal density of sound whose ghostly after-image provides a further ground for the pianist’s figures to contrast against. Bley’s style appears infinitely patient and unhurried, playing capriciously with the negative space of relative silence to produce long-held sonorities – echoes of echoes, almost – that are intensely affecting.

But what makes the album so good is also the material Bley chose to play with. Side 1 opens with two Carla Bley compositions, ‘Closer’, and the divine ‘Ida Lupino’, one of her most memorable tunes. It ends with ’Started’, credited to Paul Bley but really a paraphrase of the standard “I Can’t Get Started’, played incredibly slowly! Side 2 begins with the title track, composed by Annette Peacock, who like Carla Bley was a one-time consort of the pianist. It continues with another fake Paul Bley original, ‘Harlem’, which is an adaptation of Roy Eldridge’s ‘I Remember Harlem’, before another Carla Bley piece, ‘Seven’, and ending with another Annette Peacock, ’Nothing Ever Was, Anyway’.

The combination of perfectly matched raw material and minimalist method is one major reason why the album works so well, but there’s also Paul Bley himself, and his background. It’s easy to forget now since his death in 2016, but Bley was an incredible hot-shot jazz piano player who paid his dues in New York clubs in the epic years of 52nd Street hard bop and blues. He once told me in an interview years ago of how, accompanying Sonny Rollins, he was left comping away for perhaps an hour as he gradually realised that not only had Rollins left the stage, but possibly New York City itself. The bass and drums team for his debut LP was Charles Mingus and Art Blakey, no less.

Later, with the Jimmy Giuffre 3 trio of Giuffre, Steve Swallow and Bley, and then with his own trios, he experienced playing as quietly as once he had been loud. But even on ‘Open, to love’, Bley’s playing is drenched in the blues, despite his reticence regarding the number of notes played, and the lack of upfront emotion in how he plays them. Like Keith Jarrett, Bley grunts a bit, too, and is not averse to tinkering under the hood, plucking the strings once or twice to create that beautiful harp in a box effect. Yet in many ways he comes across as the anti-Jarrett, a less-is-more exemplar of a superficially gentler, interiorised style. ‘Open, to love’ might be the best place to find it.

The Luminessence vinyl LP of ‘Open, to love’ is released on 7 March 2025

from https://ukjazznews.com