Paul Bley, Play Blue, Oslo Concert, ECM

First published in 2014. Recorded live at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2008 inside a church of culture, a 19th-century neogothic building now used as a venue, material featured includes the Canadian free-jazz piano legend’s own compositions for the …

Published: 17 Dec 2019. Updated: 4 years.

First published in 2014. Recorded live at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2008 inside a church of culture, a 19th-century neogothic building now used as a venue, material featured includes the Canadian free-jazz piano legend’s own compositions for the most part, with Sonny Rollins’ ‘Pent-Up House’ (featured on the 1956 Prestige album Sonny Rollins Plus 4) also added.

Play Blue lives up to the initial high expectations surrounding this release operating as it does at Everest-like altitude on the same slopes as fellow sonic mountaineer Keith Jarrett’s solo concerts and records. The album is built around two very long pieces, opener ‘Far North’ and the next track, not exactly poles apart stylistically but you get the drift as it's called ‘Way Down South Suite’, followed by ‘Flame’, the longer, er, ‘Longer’, where there’s an awful lot of clapping at the end, before the familiar notes of ‘Pent-Up House’ ring out where again the audience show their wild appreciation. A formidable record, full of opaque abstractions with a certain serene mystery to it that somehow connects.

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2019 Highlight: Antoine Berjeaut and Makaya McCraven

Containing an infectiously elastic, clubby, groove that takes us one step beyond, 'The New Untitled (Potomac Avenue)' from Moving Cities out on the I See Colors label from trumpeter composer Antoine Berjeaut known in the recent past for his work …

Published: 17 Dec 2019. Updated: 4 years.

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Containing an infectiously elastic, clubby, groove that takes us one step beyond, 'The New Untitled (Potomac Avenue)' from Moving Cities out on the I See Colors label from trumpeter composer Antoine Berjeaut known in the recent past for his work with Aloe Blacc, Julien Lourau’s Groove Retrievers and Primitive London with Robin Fincker, Kit Downes and Jim Hart.

Moving Cities was produced by drummer Makaya Mc Craven and recorded in Chicago and Paris.

Check the rest of the album too via Bandcamp. The track is not just the only ear opener.

Makaya, son of Archie Shepp legend Steve McCraven, grounds the whole record entirely, and his groove does very subtle things with beat displacement slipped in almost invisibly.

However this is not just a rhythm track because there is a lot of improvising going on even when the tectonic plates hardly slip or so it seems especially as the groove goes downtempo, Berjeaut reinventing the Erik Truffaz-type space as he shifts around and adds extra grit while Julien Lourau on saxophone is as listenable-to as ever. He has always had his own vocabulary. Junius Paul on bass, Arnaud Roulin on synth, Guillaume Magne playing guitar, Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch introducing electronics and effects plus Matt Gold on guitar on a couple of tracks are the line-up. Press shot of Antoine Berjeau (top left) and Makaya McCraven. SG