This music, above all, celebrates the supremacy of improvisation over
composition and the melodic line over the harmony. In his biography,
Stopping Time,Bley(1999) confessed to “…never having been a lover of chords
– I always thought that a chord was a vertical melody played simultaneously – if a
chord couldn’t be Stripped down and each note made to line up to make a
meaningful melody, it wasn’t a good chord…”
In 1974 Paul Bley and painter Carol Goss founded Improvising Artists
Incorporated (IAI). Bley acted as the audio producer and Goss was the art
and video director. Their agenda was to record musicians with mainstream
backgrounds in free settings, and the roster of artists included Sam Rivers,
Dave Holland, Sun Ra, Lee Konitz, and Jimmy Giuffre, among
others. The musicians who recorded the twenty or so records released by IAI
were more than happy to work with Bley, whose approach as a producer was
to stay out of the way as much as possible. (time will tell – conversations with
Paul bley. Norman Meehan, 2003)
Tracks
1. Pyramid (Bill Connors)
2. Out There (Lee Konitz)
3. Talk To Me (Bill Connors)
4. Tavia (Lee Konitz)
5. Longer Than You Know (Paul Bley)
6. Play Blue (Paul Bley)
LEE KONITZ - alto & soprano saxophone
PAUL BLEY - acoustic & electric piano
BILL CONNORS– acoustic & electric guitar
Recorded June 11, 1977 at Electric Lady Studios, New York City