Paul Bley
“I’ve tried to maintain all the advances of jazz, while adding the ability to also play them all free.”
Paul Bley is one of the most influential pianists in the history of jazz, his touch instantly recognisable. Bley’s career, which now spans seven decades, has continued to be a reference for successive generations of musicians. This is unsurprising, given that the Canadian pianist has worked with “more first-rate, wide-ranging, original musical minds than anyone but Miles,” as Down Beat put it. Bley’s work has influenced many of the pianists on ECM, as well as countless musicians in the wider world.
Paul Bley was born in Montreal in 1932 and began studying the piano at the age [...]
“I’ve tried to maintain all the advances of jazz, while adding the ability to also play them all free.”
Paul Bley is one of the most influential pianists in the history of jazz, his touch instantly recognisable. Bley’s career, which now spans seven decades, has continued to be a reference for successive generations of musicians. This is unsurprising, given that the Canadian pianist has worked with “more first-rate, wide-ranging, original musical minds than anyone but Miles,” as Down Beat put it. Bley’s work has influenced many of the pianists on ECM, as well as countless musicians in the wider world.
Paul Bley was born in Montreal in 1932 and began studying the piano at the age of seven. While still a teenager, he was asked by Oscar Peterson to replace him at Montreal’s Alberta Lounge, and by 1950 was a student at the Julliard School of Music in New York. A move to Los Angeles 1957 saw Bley get involved in what would become known as free jazz, though even then he felt the aesthetics of earlier jazz could and should be incorporated into a revolutionary new art form. In the 1960s Bley took a pioneering interest in the creative possibilities of electric pianos and synthesisers.
If an “ECM aesthetic” can be said to exist, Paul Bley’s solo album of slow songs, Open, to Love (1972), “with raindrops in the right hand” (as Manfred Eicher once put it), helped define it. This record appeared so early in the label’s evolution that Eicher’s invitation to make a solo album came as a surprise to the pianist, who had not previously considered such a project. The album still sounds radical today for the way it conjures with space, silence and slow tempos.
Thirty-five years elapsed between the release of Open, to Love and a “sequel” at ECM, Solo at Mondsee, in which Bley’s transforms standard themes in a series of kaleidoscopically splintered variations. In 2014, came a further, rare solo performance, Play Blue, recorded live at the 2008’s Oslo Jazz Festival.
Always a prolific recording artist, Bley has also collaborated on a host of ECM projects as part of duos, trios and quartets, with partners who have included Gary Peacock, John Surman, Bill Frisell, Paul Motian, Evan Parker, Barre Phillips and Tony Oxley.
Reflecting on his long recording career, Bley has said, “As time moves forward, the albums become more autobiographical”.
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