Bley showed an alternative means of musical development from the trios of Bill Evans, unpicking a tune and playing with its components in unpredictable ways – odd directions, digressions, after thoughts, even second thoughts – but so that the tune remains just visible, like a figure in a cubist painting (Bley’s Picasso to Evans’ Matisse). My pick from the ground-breaking piano trio albums recorded by Bley in the Sixties, where he’s joined by Mark Levinson on double bass (of later hi-fi fame) and Barry Altschul, drums.

The introspective side of Bley’s music would predominate in later years, with only occasional flashes of this kind of revolutionary fervour. The compositions are all by Carla Bley, and the quintet manages to calm itself for one number, the lovely ‘And How the Queen’. The aptly named ‘Batterie’ is a sign of Graves’ contribution, he and Gomez providing a bubbling platform for the solos, never allowing the music to settle. Ornette is a pervasive influence, in both the way the tunes are rattled out in abbreviated unison at the outset and close of each piece, and the hyperactive ‘barrage’ of the ensemble, at times sounding like Ornette’s Free Jazz, compressed onto the head of a pin.

Recorded in 1964, shortly after the historic “October Revolution in Jazz” concert series in New York, the power and incision of this quintet cuts through the slightly muffled sound, on which Bley is joined by Dewey Johnson (trumpet) Marshall Allen (alto saxophone), Eddie Gomez (double bass) and Milford Graves (percussion).

Carla bley discography