Trios

Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard, Steve Swallow

EN / DE

Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard and Steve Swallow revisit classic Bley compositions in an exceptional album recorded in Lugano last year by Manfred Eicher. Included here are spirited new versions of “Utviklingssang” and “Vashkar”, and the suites “Les Trois Lagons”, “Wildlife” and “The Girl Who Cried Champagne”. Carla’s robust tunes are vividly conveyed, all members solo compellingly, and the trio has never sounded better.
“Trios” is one of the outstanding jazz albums of the season and marks the first time that a new Carla Bley album has appeared on ECM itself (rather than the ECM-distributed WATT label, which has been her primary platform for 40 years).

Drei Ausnahmekönner, die niemandem mehr etwas beweisen müssen und sich blind verstehen, spielen sich in idealer Umgebung die Bälle zu: Von Manfred Eicher in Lugano produziert, lassen Pianistin Carla Bley, Saxophonist Andy Sheppard und Bassist Steve Swallow (jenes Trio, das vor fast zwanzig Jahren die epochalen Songs With Legs einspielte) klassische Bley-Kompositionen in neuen Versionen wieder aufblühen. So sind hier beseelte neue Fassungen von „Utviklingssang“, „Vashkar“ und die Suiten „Les Trois Lagons“, „Wildlife“ und „The Girl Who Cried Champagne“ enthalten. Diese robusten Stücke werden hier äußerst lebendig präsentiert, alle drei Musiker solieren inspiriert.
Trios ist eines der herausragenden Jazzalben der Saison – und übrigens das erste Carla Bley-Album, das auf ECM selbst erscheint (und nicht auf dem von ECM vertriebenen WATT-Label, das 40 Jahre lang die Plattform für Bleys Veröffentlichungen war).
Featured Artists Recorded

April 2012, Auditorio RSI - Radio Svizzera, Lugano

Original Release Date

09.09.2013

  • 1Utviklingssang
    (Carla Bley)
    07:55
  • 2Vashkar
    (Carla Bley)
    07:22
  • 3Les Trois Lagons (d'apres Henri Matisse): Plate XVII - Plate XVIII - Plate XIX
    (Carla Bley)
    14:59
  • 4Wildlife: Horns - Paws Without Claws - Sex With Birds
    (Carla Bley)
    11:34
  • 5The Girl Who Cried Champagne: Part 1, 2, 3
    (Carla Bley)
    14:24
Carla Bley’s trio of piano, sax and bass guitar fits her agile, gently melancholic and slightly self-mocking idiom to a T. She’s so confident in her own composing powers she can make a blatant nod towards Rael’s ‘Bolero’ in ‘Vashkar’, and Monk’s pungent seventh chords in ‘Les Trios Lagons’, knowing these will be subsumed into something entirely personal. ‘The Girl Who Cried Champagne’ also shows a nice line in surprise endings. An endearing blend of sophistication and whimsy.
Ivan Hewett, Daily Telegraph
 
Was für Melodien! Welche Transparenz! Brüchig, spröde und doch federleicht wirkt Carla Bleys Klavierspiel, und beschwingt tanzen die Melodien aus Andy Sheppards Tenor- oder Sopransax. Steve Swallows obertonreicher Elektrobass umturtelt dieses Geschehen […] ein Opus voll unerwarteter Wendungen, mit tiefer innerer Harmonie und der für das annähernd gesamte Werk Bleys typischen Melancholie. Wie diese drei in der klanglich perfekten Produktion miteinander kommunizieren, wie sie Räume öffnen und schließen, zählt zum Feinsten im komponierten Jazz der letzten Jahre.
Werner Stiefele, Stereoplay
 
This record, her first for ECM, is a retrospective take on pieces written for different formats re-imagined for her trio of 20 years standing. With producer Manfred Eicher at the studio controls, it’s a match made in chamber jazz heaven. Eicher chose the tunes and his influence is there from the opener ‘Utviklingssang’.
Gary Booth, BBC Music Magazine
 
Surely the trio’s empathy and depth of expression has never been better captured. With Bley’s beautifully clear-minded  compositions and undimmed pianism, Swallow’s effortless shifts from accompanist to melodist, and Sheppard’s saxophone as communicative as a human voice, this is flawless music.
Steve Harris, Hi-Fi News
 
Bley can be an engaging soloist whether she is on acoustic piano or organ. And an album as intimate as ‘Trios’, thankfully, lends itself to a lot of soloing on Bley’s part. She doesn’t play any organ on this album, sticking to the acoustic piano instead. And she is compelling on that instrument, taking  a very introspective approach on these songs from the past. Bley hasn’t lost anything along the way. And on ‘Trios’, it is evident that she is still very much on top of her game.
Alex Henderson, Jazz Inside Magazine
 
Giving herself fully to the direction of producer Manfred Eicher for – somewhat unbelievably – her ECM debut as a leader, Bley repurposes some works for trio, while others are heard in unusual context. Regardless of the approach, the result allows light to illuminate unfamilar curves and crevices in these well-worn pieces.
James Hale, Downbeat
 
La belleza che sperimenta [...] Andy Sheppard sempre pronto a far da perno melodico all’oscillare ritmico e armonico di pianoforte e basso. I un progressivo gioco a levare, ritocccare, lisciare, il trio affronta e rimodella come creta vergine composizioni scritte es registrate dalla pianista in epoche diverse.
(Experimenting Beauty [...] The ever-present Andy Sheppard adds melodic support to the rhythmic and harmonic fluctuations of piano and bass. Progressively removing, adjusting, and smoothening elements, the trio tackles and reshapes the material of the pianist's compositions from various periods, as if it were fresh clay. )
Paolo Odello, L’unità
 
‘Trios’ adheres to Bley’s vision in that the ideals frame the structures, offering opportunities for her ongtime collaborators, particularly tenor and soprano saxophonist Andy Sheppard, to shine. Bley’s plaing is beautifully evocative, and her interaction with bassist Steve swallow is effortless almost to the point of translucence. [...] The spiritual awareness that underlies much of Bley’s craft is always at hand as the trio explores these strange, haunting melodies with quiet awe.
John Swenson, Stereophile
Trios is the first of Carla Bley’s albums to be recorded directly for ECM. Although she has been part of the larger ECM story for forty years, and although much of her life’s work – documented on JCOA and WATT – has been distributed through ECM channels, Trios marks only the second time that Carla Bley and producer Manfred Eicher have been in the studio together (the first occasion being the 1982 recording of Charlie Haden’s The Ballad of the Fallen, for which Carla played piano and wrote arrangements).

On Trios Carla Bley – together with Steve Swallow and Andy Sheppard – revisits some favourite pieces in an album that pays particular attention to her qualities as jazz composer and highly individual pianist and emphasises the strengths of the trio. There is an elegance to the group sound, rooted in long years of reckoning with the material. Bassist Steve Swallow has been playing Carla Bley’s tunes since the early 1960s, and has been a member of all Bley’s touring bands since 1978. Andy Sheppard has been a regular Bley associate since 1987, appearing on a dozen albums since 1987’s Fleur Carnivore.

“A lot of my albums have a sense of things being about to fall apart. But the personality of this record is quite serious,” Carla says. “It’s also rather nostalgic. We’ve been playing in the trio format for 20 years now and we have a huge book of music. So in the studio in Lugano, we just started playing one tune after another and recorded the ones that Manfred was interested in. He chose each one, and we liked that idea. This was the first time in my life that I’d worked under the direction of a producer and I wanted to know what it was like, and what I could gain from it. He had some wild ideas – like starting with ‘Utviklingssang’, which we’d normally play after a few fast numbers, or as an encore...”

“Utviklingssang” is a Bley original that sounds like a Scandinavian folk song (the title means “Development Song” in Norwegian). She’d been asked by a promoter to write a piece with a Nordic flavour for a tour with the Scandinavian All-Stars, and refused, “but the piece came out of me anyway.” The piece was titled after Bley witnessed an Oslo protest march against the building of dams to generate more energy for Southern Norway which, it was said, would adversely affect wildlife in Lapland. It must rank amongst the prettiest of protest pieces. Stereophile magazine once hailed it as “a hushed, modal masterpiece.” “Utviklingssang” was first heard on record played by a nine-piece band on the Social Studies album (1980), then appeared on Duets with the irreducible core team of Bley and Swallow in 1988, and in an octet version on 4 x 4 (with Shepherd as one of the sax players) in 1999.

The oldest tune here is “Vashkar”, which many listeners first heard on Paul Bley’s landmark Footloose album in 1963, with Steve Swallow and Pete La Roca. Other iconic – and radically different – interpretations have included the Tony Williams’ Lifetime on Emergency, ushering in the first wave of electric jazz in 1969, and the delicate duo version by Gary Burton and Steve Swallow on ECM’s Hotel Hello in 1974. The composer’s own version is robust and buoyant. As with all her interpretations of her own work, Carla Bley keeps pathos and melodrama on short leashes. “We just play the music and take some solos,” she says drily. “We play it very close to the way it was written.” A vivid character sketch is conveyed. So who was Vashkar? “He was a friend of [poet and author] Paul Haines’. Paul liked him very much and was always quoting him. Vashkar said this, Vashkar did that. Vashkar takes two teabags in his teacup. And so on… So I wrote a song for Vashkar and it seemed to have a little bit of the flavour of that part of the world in it. And that was something that continued with ‘Escalator Over The Hill’ which was set in India, also influenced by the fact that Paul Haines was living in India at that time.”

The composition of “Les Trois Lagons” was commissioned by the Grenoble Jazz Festival. Bley was asked to choose a plate from “Jazz”, Henri Matisse’s book of cut-outs, and to write music inspired by it. She chose related plates, all called ‘Lagons’, and “wrote the piece while looking out the window at a real lagoon.” It was premiered by the Carla Bley-Andy Sheppard-Steve Swallow trio at the Grenoble Jazz Festival in 1996. “One of the things that I hoped to show with this new album was that some pieces that were later orchestrated in fact started life as trio pieces. In the case of ‘Les Trois Lagons’ the trio version is still, to me, the best. And I like this new recording of it more than the octet version on 4 x 4.”

The “Wildlife” suite comprised of “Horns”, “Paws Without Claws” and “Sex With Birds” was first heard, in a very different arrangement with synthesizer interludes, organ and brass on Night-Glo (1985). Bley: “This is one that is quite new for the trio. It took a long time to work out how to do it. The line-up that originally recorded it never travelled, and I wanted to give it some legs, bring it back into the repertoire.”

“The Girl Who Cried Champagne” has likewise been through varied reinterpretations from the sleek 1986 Sextet version with Hiram Bullock and Larry Willis to The Big Carla Band on Fleur Carnivore in 1989. Its title is an autobiographical reference: “I said I’d finished the piece, and usually when I finish a piece Steve (Swallow) buys me a bottle of champagne. But I hadn’t really finished – I was crying wolf. So from that time on I was The Girl Who Cried Champagne.“

The trio has a number of concerts in Europe in October and November culminating in a residency at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria, which will find Bley playing in different formats, augmented by strings for the repertoire of Fancy Chamber Music, and by brass group for Carla’s Christmas Carols.