Bley/Parker/Phillips

January 4 - 11, 1 9 9 6

*** Bley/Parker/Phillips

TIME WELL TELL

(ECM)

This is dreamlike noodling of a very high order. After all, pianist Paul Bley, saxophonist Evan Parker, and bassist Barre Phillips are inventors of this kind of spontaneous collective improvisation, which is as rooted in European chamber music as in American jazz. On the 17-minute "Poetic Justice" they squiggle along playing motivic cat-and-mouse with one another's melodic lines, creating their own drummerless, tempo-less tension (not as easy to do as you'd think), gradually accumulating a density of exclamatory blips, dots-and-dashes of notes, slap-tongued reeds, bowed lines.

The whole album is the musical equivalent of Japanese calligraphy: black mark to white ground, every stroke counts, one false move and you have to throw the sheet away. Most of the selections here hover at around five minutes, and it's a tribute to the discipline and ears of these master improvisers that they're able to come up with a real piece every time (who knows how much got thrown away). Occasionally they even imply a regular beat.

-- Jon Garelick