muzycy:
Paul Bley: piano
Hans Koch: reeds (clarinets & saxophones)
Franz Koglmann: flugelhorn

The Guardian; rating: * * * *; Friday April 25, 2008
Paul Bley, the Canadian jazz-piano elder statesman who helped introduce the world to Ornette Coleman, is a fearless cross-genre experimenter; his keyboard virtuosity gives him a gravitas that lets most of his ventures dictate their own standards. He does everything with such certainty that the outcomes, however wayward or ostensibly insular, take on a sort of inevitability. ECM recently released a meditative set of unaccompanied variations from Bley; this album is a mix of solo, duo, and trio pieces, also involving reeds player Hans Koch and flugelhornist Franz Koglmann. Bley's improvised solos glitter, trill, dart and rumble with the taut precision of compositions, at times joining an almost Jarrett-like convivial chime to variations on the atonality of Schoenberg and Webern, and even outbursts of boogie-woogie. The group sections explore soft brass reveries set against staccato reed-blasts that sound like shots from an air-gun; ghostly bass clarinet notes against sharp piano chords; strange swing sections, in which snorting bass clarinet sounds become a kind of walking bass; and some jazzy duets in which Koch's tenor oddly resembles Evan Parker and Sonny Rollins. Bley's slowly weaving yet sometimes startlingly funky blues on Solo 6 is typical of the scope of his embrace of 20th-century music of all kinds. This is perhaps predominantly a set for free-jazz fans; however, it's jostling with absorbing melody, and all 18 tracks are invitingly short.
by John Fordham




Editor's info:
"... there is in essence no difference between consonance and dissonance ... there is therefore no real distinction, rather a difference of degree between them. Dissonance is only a further rung on a ladder which continues to develop."
Anton Webern

If, after over 400 years of harmonic development, atonality is the primary advance of European "classical" music i.......
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