[JPL] 3 Jazzmen, Obstinate and Wily

[r durfee]

August 24, 2007
Music Review
3 Jazzmen, Obstinate and Wily 
By BEN RATLIFF
The bassist Gary Peacock, the pianist Paul Bley and
the drummer Paul Motian opened their week at Birdland
on Wednesday and quickly slipped into a funny ritual
of cussedness.

About an hour long, the set superficially resembled a
normal jazz-club performance: about a half-dozen
songs, ballads, blues, standards, free improvisation
and applause in the right places. The signposts were
there, but it was as if they had been uprooted, turned
around and put upside down. A song turned out not to
be a song, or ended without fanfare, or showed no
organized routine of theme and variations, or showed
more wiliness than you thought was there. 

All three musicians came up in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, when most assumptions about jazz became
deeply suspect. One of those assumptions — and these
musicians, in particular, overturned it — was that a
piano trio is a leader with two accompanists. 

All three were involved in music that subsequently
served as blueprints for advancing jazz. Back then Mr.
Peacock made his blueprints with Mr. Bley, Albert
Ayler and Bill Evans; Mr. Bley with Ornette Coleman
and Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Giuffre; Mr. Motian with
Bill Evans. They don’t play together as a trio much
anymore, and the challenge for them now is how to stay
obstinate, how not to sound like their own blueprint. 

This is a cooperative trio, but Mr. Bley was the
music’s prompter and also the one musician who battled
against the music most, or retreated farthest from it.
He started off each piece of music with a slow,
deliberate melody, usually ad-libbed. And most of what
followed (except for a version of Sonny Rollins’s
“Pent-Up House” and a little decontextualized chunk of
“I Can’t Get Started”) was freely improvised
interaction, even if it didn’t sound that way. 

Mr. Bley seized on wisps of familiar language: a
ballad’s chord progression, a bebop line or a
beautiful blues phrase. Each of these moments lasted
long enough to change the temperature of the music but
not long enough to reveal itself as a particular song.
He used these moments as connecting pieces and kept
going forward. Or sometimes he didn’t go forward at
all; sometimes he played a short, percussive phrase
that stemmed his flow entirely, then fell silent.

Mr. Peacock listened hard and followed the arc of Mr.
Bley’s quickly changing harmonies. He kept the band
regular, more or less, with big, clean notes, tracing
a clear shape through the music, even playing walking
eighth notes where it needed shoring up.

Mr. Motian maintained a steady pulse, with constantly
varying meter. His playing can have a poker face, a
fascinating lack of affect, and here he used it
brilliantly. He never busied up the music or acted as
manic accompanist.

Even as he maintained steady swing patterns on his
cymbals — and, given a tune, strictly followed the
melody and structure of “Pent-Up House” — he didn’t
respond to the usual prompts. He dumped the received
wisdom and just played what he thought appropriate.
There is a standard language of dynamics and ornament
in jazz drumming, and when you hear someone ignore all
that, it can be spooky.

The Gary Peacock/Paul Bley/Paul Motian trio continues
through Saturday night at Birdland, 315 West 44th
Street, Clinton, (212) 581-3080.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/arts/music/24bley.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref=login

Roy Durfee
P.O. Box 40219
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87196-0219
rdurfee2003 at yahoo.com


       
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