Paul Bley - with Gary Peacock

Gary Peacock shares front-cover billing with Paul Bley on this 1970 session, but drummer Paul Motian is also present on the first five tracks. (Billy Elgart replaces Motian on the remaining three.)

There's a curiously straight-ahead, tempo-driven feel to this short and sweet disc, quite unlike the free aesthetic that Bley, Peacock, and Motian put forward when they returned to ECM as a trio on 1999's Not Two, Not One. That's not to say the music is conventional: there are two tunes apiece by Bley, Ornette Coleman, and Annette Peacock and one by Gary Peacock, in addition to the lone standard, Jerome Kern's "Long Ago and Far Away." (The finale, "Albert's Love Theme" by Annette Peacock, stands out as the most abstract of the bunch.) The brittle, lo-fi sound doesn't detract from the album's historical value.

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