Paul Bley: Floater & Syndrome The Upright Piano Sessions Revisited

One way for a musician to conjure rapture is through full-frontal shamanic assault, the sonic equivalent of the Orgasmatron machine that Jane Fonda's character encounters in Roger Vadim's 1968 sci-fi romp Barbarella. Funk is an ideal vehicle. But the sensations produced are superficial and short-lived. A less travelled path instead uses subtlety, understatement and nuance, and the music approaches laterally, almost by stealth. The stratagem demands more of the musician, and indeed more of the listener, but the result can be life changing. We all have our favourites, but among the obvious nominees are Bill Evans' late 1950s/early 1960s trios, Mozart's "Haydn" string quartets, Wayne Shorter's new millennial quartet, Oded Tzur's present-day quartet—and Paul Bley.

Bley was a complex character. His singularly Delphic pianism, caught in its formative glory on these fifteen 1962-63 tracks, existed alongside, and despite, a mercilessly competitive approach to his bandmates, and parallel to Bley's simultaneous desire for them to break free of the piano trio's conventional top-down hierarchy (something Evans was in his on the Savoy albums Footloose! and Floater, his trio music had come a long way. Eight years at finishing schools on the West and East coasts, including a spell in Los Angeles championing Ornette Coleman and losing a residency as a result, had unbuttoned Bley's paradigm.

Chief among the developments was a change in the type of material Bley chose to record. On his two earlier trio albums—Introducing Paul Bley and Paul Bley—most of the pieces are standards or familiar items from the Great American Songbook. For the Savoy sessions, the tunes are mainly originals, some written by Bley, most by Carla Bley.

The Savoy sessions provide the first recorded evidence of Carla's impact on Paul's music. Bley, usually an expansive raconteur, said little about this himself, or about the impact of Annette Peacock's writing, other than to tell Norman Meehan, "The music was easy, but the relationships..." However, in a 2018 interview with Ethan Iverson (accessible online), Carla Bley sets out her approach to composing for her husband: "He asked me to do it, it wasn't my idea. I had my own kind of music where I own way also encouraging around the same time). In Time Will Tell: Conversations With Paul Bley, Bley tells Norman Meehan, his conversational straight man, that he was, for instance, "an antagonist" of Bill Evans. He goes on to say that during the 1960 sessions for George Russell's Jazz In The Space Age, for which in a stroke of genius Russell had engaged the mighty odd couple of Bley and Evans, his motivation was, "I'm going to knock this guy out and he's going to sound bad."

In a 2006 interview with All About Jazz, Bley, referring to an upcoming series of duo concerts with Frank Kimbrough, doubled down on the idea.

"Attack is my main frame of reference," said Bley. "I love attack. It's rare. It used to be normal in the '50s and '60s. Destruction was one of the key tools to improvisation. It keeps the blood flowing and the brain turning." Contacted for a response, Kimbrough said, "I think the destruction he's talking about is just to make someone realize something that they haven't realized before."

If Kimbrough was right, then Bley was employing the same technique, minus the aggression, that Charles Mingus used with his bands. There is a kind of connectivity to that, because in 1954, Mingus was a member of the trio which made Bley's debut, Introducing Paul Bley. By 1962, however, when Bley began recording the material on this ezz-thetics disc, first released It was once said of Bley that he was the only pianist who could make a concert grand sound like an upright. While that is not literally true, or only partly so, it makes a point that strikes home on these often strange, offbeat, otherworldly tracks. It is a quality preserved by Michael Brändli's typically sensitive sonic restoration, which increases the probability of rapture. Enjoy.

Liner Notes copyright © 2025 Chris May.

Floater & Syndrome The Upright Piano Sessions Revisited can be purchased here.

Contact Chris May at All About Jazz.
Chris May is a senior editor of All About Jazz. He was previously the editor of the pioneering magazine Black Music & Jazz Review, and more recently editor of the style / culture / history magazine Jocks & Nerds.

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