Paul Bley - Open, to Love (1981 Japanese ECM Vinyl LP)

Paul Bley - Open, to Love | Vinyl LP - 1981 Japanese ECM/Trio Records (PAP-25522)

• One of the most influential solo piano recordings in jazz history, the third chapter in ECM's revolutionary solo piano series after Chick Corea's Piano Improvisations and Keith Jarrett's Facing You
• Compositions by Carla Bley and Annette Peacock, Paul Bley's two former partners, alongside two Bley originals built from deconstructed jazz standards
• Japanese pressing on ECM/Trio Records, produced by Manfred Eicher, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug at Arne Bendiksen Studio in Oslo

Paul Bley had been a central figure in free jazz for nearly twenty years by the time he recorded this album, having played with Ornette Coleman as early as 1958, championed Carla Bley's compositions before anyone else would touch them, and pushed electronic instruments to their limits with Annette Peacock. Open, to Love strips everything back to a solo piano and seven pieces played in a single session. The programme is almost entirely written by his two former partners: Carla Bley contributes "Closer", "Ida Lupino" and "Seven", while Annette Peacock supplies "Open, to Love" and the closing "Nothing Ever Was, Anyway". Bley's own two pieces, "Started" and "Harlem", are not original compositions in the usual sense but reimagined fragments of jazz standards, "I Can't Get Started" and "I Remember Harlem", pulled apart until the source material dissolves into something abstract and dreamlike. "Closer" opens the album with a slow, spare reading that sets the tone immediately: long pauses between phrases, notes placed with deliberate care, silence treated as part of the music rather than an absence of it.

"Ida Lupino", Carla Bley's most enduring composition, runs seven and a half minutes and is the album's emotional centre. Bley deepens the blues elements of the melody, his left hand brushing an almost Errol Garner-like ostinato while his right hand pushes the improvisation toward abstraction without ever quite arriving there. The tension between lyricism and dissonance runs through the entire record. Side B opens with Peacock's title track, the most expansive piece on the date, where Bley's phrasing is at its most spacious. "Harlem" follows at just over three minutes, the shortest track and the most fragmentary. "Seven", another Carla Bley piece, rebuilds the momentum, and "Nothing Ever Was, Anyway" closes the album with a performancey that is the album's summation, Bley making full use of the dynamic range of the instrument.

Produced by Manfred Eicher and engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug at Arne Bendiksen Studio, Oslo, on September 11, 1972. This is the 1981 Japanese pressing on Trio Records (PAP-25522), manufactured by Trio Electronics, with Barbara Wojirsch cover design and Ib Skovgaard Petersen photography.