I never thought I’d live to say it, but Paul Bley hasn’t been releasing enough discs lately – the pianist’s usual torrent has slowed down in the last few years to a modest trickle. If he doesn’t watch out he’ll find himself slipping in the Most Documented Artist rankings, while the Steve Lacy discography marches serenely on and younger guys like Evan Parker, David Murray and Anthony Braxton surge past mercilessly. Well, meanwhile here’s a chance to dig back in the archives, courtesy Sunnyside’s reissues of the output of the French label Owl. Partners is a studio date from 18 December 1989, featuring Bley with bassist Gary Peacock. It is carefully divided between piano solos, bass solos and duos (respectively: four, six and five apiece); most pieces are freely improvised, but there is also one cover, Ornette’s “Latin Genetics.” (As is his wont, Bley immediately rerecorded the tune a few months later on Memoirs, a trio date on Soul Note with Haden and Motian.) However spontaneous, there’s no toe-in-the-water hesitancy to the improvisations as they get underway. Bley and Peacock’s opening motifs arrive fully-formed, and are launched as briskly as skiffs thrust into water. Even on tracks other than “Latin Genetics” Ornette seems a guiding spirit – his influence is audible, certainly, in the cheerful, drastic overhaul of bebop line-spinning on pieces like “Workinoot” (Peacock solo) and “Octavon” (Bley solo). Peacock plays mightily throughout; Bley is as always pensive, though even on ballads one wouldn’t exactly call him tender – how could you, when those amazingly extended righthand lines go shooting across the keyboard like tentacles? They may not be loud, but they can grip – and can squeeze hard too. When the two musicians play together it’s a treat and sometimes – the freebop of “Latin Genetics” and “Who’s Who Is It?,” the glimmerous depths of “Again Anew” – positively hairraising. Great stuff, and an A-list disc for fans of either artist.

When Bley recorded Partners it was his third consecutive day at New York’s Sound on Sound Studio; on the first two he’d been part of the reunited Jimmy Giuffre Trio, sessions released by Owl as Life of a Trio: Saturday and Sunday (both also available in Sunnyside reissues). The Giuffre/Bley/Swallow trio of 1961-62 made only three studio recordings, each more deeply estranged than the last – you could call it “outsider jazz,” especially the truly alien Free Fall of 1962. By 1989 much of what was unprecedented on those discs had been absorbed into European jazz and free improvisation; Life of a Trio lacked the original discs’ exploratory, into-the-void feel but was nonetheless a strongly played set of (mostly free) improvisations, evenly split like Free Fall and many an ECM disc between solo, duo and trio tracks. The trio later reconvened again for Fly Away Little Bird (Owl, 1992; now reissued on Sunnyside) and Conversations with a Goose (Soul Note, 1996). Fly Away Little Bird is unusual for emphasizing composed material: five standards (including “Goodbye,” which they recorded for the 1961 LP Thesis) and originals by Giuffre and his wife Juanita. Giuffre’s one solo feature, “Tumbleweed,” is downright odd: a mix of squiggly Free Fall clarinet, cracked vocals of on-the-brink unintelligibility, and boppish changes-running. Eventually he shouts that he’s “between horns!,” then grabs his soprano sax for a lovely coda. Nearly as odd is the trio reading of “All the Things You Are”: Bley, who often reins himself in elsewhere on the disc, is here so forceful he virtually sidelines Giuffre, even brusquely ignoring Giuffre’s cue for the head near the start. The album’s standout tracks are “Fly Away Little Bird,” which wrings an extraordinary tremulous climax from the simplest and purest of materials; Juanita Giuffre’s “Possibilities,” which opens so polymorphously it could lead anywhere but turns out to be a sneaky, undulating blues; the beautifully sustained and various collective improvisation “Bats in the Belfry” (its last episode as fingerpopping as this trio has ever got); and Bley’s two solo pieces. At 76 minutes the disc could have stood some pruning, but there’s a wonderful 45-minute LP buried in here somewhere.

Nate Dorward

Squid’s Ear, 2003