The quiet freedoms of Jimmy Giuffre’s 1961-62 trio have cast a long shadow via their influence on the ECM sound and on players such as Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker and Joe McPhee. The trio reunited in the studio on two consecutive days in 1989 to record these albums, which seem also to have seen currency under the title Diary of a Trio. The sessions begin where the Trio’s 1962 album Free Fall left off, and gradually move into different territory. Saturday is highly abstract and austere, with only three of its 12 tracks utilizing the full trio and most of them sounding freely improvised. Bley, astringent and forceful, is the dominant player, taking three solo spots. The balance of the session gradually shifts as Giuffre sets aside his clarinet halfway through the disc in favour of the more forthright soprano, and the disc ends with its least typical and most conventionally pulsed track, Swallow’s “By the Way,” which is pushed along by Bley’s throbbing manually-damped chords. That track sets the tone for Sunday, a more immediately accessible recording which places much more emphasis on the full trio. There are some perfect miniatures among these tracks, such as “The Giant Guitar and the Black Stick,” a Giuffre/Swallow duo which peaks in the middle on a muted tragic cry from Giuffre, and Bley’s flawless solo “Mephisto.” By the end of Sunday a more conventional jazz idiom has begun to emerge from the far side of abstraction: there’s a pair of minor-key blues, a Carla Bley tune, a tango and what sounds like a contrafact on a standard, called “Things.” It is a pleasure to have this pair of discs back in circulation, which, even if they inevitably lack the extraordinary visionary quality of the 1961-62 trio recordings, document a fascinating second chapter in the life of one of the key groups in modern jazz.

Nate Dorward

Coda, May/June 2002