CONVERSATIONS WITH STEVE SWALLOW ABOUT PAUL BLEY
(February and September 2025)

In early 2025, I was asked by Adam Olschewski to write a piece about Paul Bley for the German Jazz Podium magazine on the occasion of ECM re-releasing Bley’s seminal solo album, Open, to Love on vinyl.
I spent a great deal of my formative years listening to Paul Bley’s music and would call him a significant influence on my playing. Unfortunately – aside from a very brief encounter before a memorable duo concert with Gary Peacock in Cologne in the early 90s – I never got to know the man personally.
However, I had the great fortune to play with Steve Swallow on a number of concerts organized by saxophonist Paul Heller in the early ‘00s and we sporadically kept in touch over the years.
Steve was an important collaborator of Bley’s in the early ‘60s (landmark recordings such as Footloose, Closer, and the Jimmy Giuffre Trio’s Fusion, Thesis, Free Fall as well as some live recordings).
Steve was so gracious and generous to spend time with me on three Zoom calls that took place in February and September 2025 where we delved deeply into the Bley universe. I am enormously grateful to him for sharing his memories and reflections about this important period in creative music and for giving me permission to transcribe and publish our conversations.
Some of the information he shared found its way into the Jazz Podium article about Paul Bley that was published (in German) in the April/May issue of 2025.
The second conversation (in September ’25) revolved more around Steve Swallow’s own musical career and general observations. Only the Paul Bley-related material is included here. There are plans for a future publication about Steve in the Jazz Podium magazine.
Please enjoy the full transcript of our conversations about Paul Bley below.
Many thanks to Gabriele Guenther for proofreading and editing.



Achim:
For younger generations, the late 50s / early 60s seem like a magical time in music. So many things were happening at the same time. A lot of great jazz players from older days were still active, including Ellington, Armstrong. At the same time, new stuff was happening.

Steve:
It was a remarkable confluence of forces at that time.
And I think not only the time was a magical time, but that New York City was a critical and magical place at that time as well.
Geography was more important then than it is now.
At this very moment, we are superseding geography in a way that wasn’t possible in 1960.
In 1960, it was really necessary to go to New York. Or at any rate it was in my eyes. And so, I went.
But it wasn’t just the jazz community, there was an astonishing, vibrant community of painters and writers and theatre people.
All of it was happening. In fact, I think the painting scene and to some extent the writing scene as well was just in the very last moment of its brightest flourishing.
The abstract expressionist painters – Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline – had just been at the height of their powers. Of course, we had no historical context at the time because we were living it, but it was a remarkable time.       

A:  Did you interact much with the painters, did they come to gigs?

S: Yes, they did. I don’t want to make too much of it, but they were around and many of us musicians were seeking them out as well. When I first came to New York, I’d go to the bars where I knew the painters were hanging out and would sit very quietly, watching what was going on.
The famous Five Spot Club where Ornette Coleman shook up the jazz community so radically was started under the auspices of a bunch of painters. Larry Rivers was at the center of the group of artists who prevailed upon the owners of that small, dirty bar at the fringes of Greenwich Village to have live music. If it were not for the impetus provided by painters, the Five Spot scene would not have happened. It was a time when real estate was especially cheap in lower Manhattan. Apartments and even more loft buildings were widely available. And cheap. The painters were the initial colonizers of these spaces because they needed large spaces with a lot of light coming in to them. But the musicians and in particular the jazz musicians followed shortly after the painters and lived side by side with them. It was not only that we shared aesthetics, we were also sharing living spaces.
There was a famous loft on 6th Avenue – and this relates to Paul Bley as well because Paul and I often went to play there. It was a loft in a building that belonged to a photographer named Gene Smith, W. Eugene Smith.
It was a magical place. That loft space became a nexus for musicians of all sorts.
It was initially rented by a painter, David Young, a very good abstract expressionist painter. It was David Young’s love for jazz music that led directly to a piano appearing in that loft and musicians beginning to appear shortly thereafter.
   
That loft scene, the loft that belonged to Gene Smith was a focal point of just what you described, of multi-generational interest in playing improvised music. I remember playing there with Pee Wee Russell and Vic Dickenson, the next moment with Zoot Sims and Sonny Clark, and the moment after that with Paul Bley.
Of course, all of these musicians enjoyed each other’s company and each other’s music tremendously. As usual it was only the critical community which made strong distinctions between styles. Style was not the issue at all for the community of players.                           

A: So on some nights that you’d have Pee Wee Russell and Zoot Sims playing, and then right afterwards Paul Bley?

S: That may be a bit of an exaggeration. But on consecutive nights, it certainly would have happened like that. You never knew when you went to that space whether you’d be playing Struttin’ with some Barbecue or Confirmation. It was an open issue until you got there.

A: You and Paul Bley played a lot as a duo in those days, doing coffee-house gigs, for example? Or did you play in fluctuating groups, in trios maybe? Or what was your main work relationship?

S: I think the main relationship in those early days – and this would be 1960 going on into 1961 – Paul and I were for the most part playing as a duo. That was really what we loved to do and it also made economic sense. We played a lot in the coffee houses in the West Village. The gigs paid 5 dollars and all the coffee you could drink. They were reluctant to spend the money on a drummer and also reluctant to accommodate the increase in volume that the presence of a drummer implied. I must say again that these gigs at the coffee houses in Greenwich Village – and there were many, many of these gigs and they supported many of us from month to month – were always occasions to sit in. 
So Paul and I would play the job as a duo, and we’d be the two people to receive the 5 dollars each. But an endless cast of horn players would come and go and sit in. And drummers as well. They would actually bring their own drums and set up,
play a set or two, then take their drums back to the subway.
I remember Al Foster used to come by. Yeah, it was lovely.        

A: Did that coffee-house scene change a short while later when singer/songwriters started coming in? They also took those gigs, didn’t they? Singers like Bob Dylan?

S: Yes, that is exactly what happened. They took the gigs from the jazz players.

A: So those scenes didn’t really coexist?

S: The singer/songwriters were the end of the jazz gigs on Bleecker Street. And it happened rather quickly, in 1962 and 1963. That was kind of the end of that source of revenue for the jazz guys.

A: On these gigs, did you mostly play standards? Or did you also play some of the material that ended up on Footloose, like some of Carla Bley’s pieces?

S: We were playing both, yes. Right from the beginning, when I began playing with Paul which was in late 1959, we were playing Carla’s repertoire of short pieces that she wrote at that time and abandoned shortly thereafter. She stopped writing those very concise –

A: Like Floater?

S: Yeah, songs of that sort. The period in which she wrote those was fairly brief. But we were also playing standards. Paul actually had a fairly small repertoire of Standards: Long Ago and Far Away, I Loves You Porgy and a few others. A handful of standards that he liked to play.                    

A: On Footloose, there are some ballads, some of which were released only on later editions, such as I Can’t Started or These Foolish Things. The way they are played resembles a “hide and seek game” of sorts. You’d hear a fragment of the song, and you’d think, “Hey, that sounds kind of like that tune”. And then at some point, Bley would play a clear phrase, and you’d realize, “It IS the tune!” It was so well hidden in the beginning.

S: “It is the tune”. Yeah. That was a game that he’d play with the listener. But he’d also be playing it with me. He was daring me to commit to the structure of These Foolish Things. And as soon as I did, of course he went somewhere else. And as soon as I went to the bridge, he went to the first A. He liked nothing better than the constant pull that resulted from arguing over the structure as we were playing the song.

A: He liked the tension.

S: He liked the tension, and he liked the accidents and incidents that happened when where you were in the structure was forever being questioned. There were no overriding rules about where you were in the structure.   
 
A: I guess you wouldn’t really talk about that. Or would you?

S: No, Paul would never talk about it. He would discuss it for hours in abstract terms but never in specific terms.

A: You couldn’t specifically ask, “Why did you play the bridge when I played A…?”

S: Yeah, to a question like that you would never get a specific or clear answer. But he might talk for twenty minutes about the question itself. Or his response might be, “Why do you ask?” That would lead to a discussion about the mechanics of improvisation that would be very interesting but that would not answer the question: “Why didn’t you go to the bridge with me?”           

A: Still, when listening to these recordings, his sense of form seemed beyond question, in fact everybody’s feeling for the form is so strong. For instance, on When will the Blues Leave – when one doesn’t listen actively, one can get lost easily. But when one really tries to follow the 12-bar form, it’s always there, always correct. Even though Pete La Roca almost never plays a strong downbeat, and Paul’s phrases start in such weird places that they sometimes sound displaced, the form itself is never in question.

S: I agree entirely. I particularly liked the dynamic of the relationship between Pete and Paul, because Pete was really insistent on the values of post-bebop music and also on the presence of a fixed pulse in the music. Those were absolute values in his mind.
I brought Pete to Paul. I had discovered Pete on a gig with Don Ellis and Jaki Byard and fell instantly in love with Pete’s playing. Paul enjoyed the ongoing ceaseless battle that he engaged in with Pete. Pete enjoyed it as well; they saw each other as worthy opponents. I think they both – although they wouldn’t admit it – saw the clear value in the result of their playing together despite that it was, in fact, a form of argument.

At this point the video connection was interrupted. It turned out that there was a power outage in the area where Steve lives. We were able to resume our conversation two days later.

S: I’ve been thinking, in particular, that my role in that trio and in that event, i.e. the recording of that album, was to act very much [as an intermediary] between the two of them, to reinforce the opposing aesthetics that they brought to the studio. To reinforce each of them in turn as I felt they needed it, to keep them at the table in effect. The recording was in its way a kind of negotiation between Pete and Paul who were both really insisting on certain aspects of their aesthetic. My role was to insist that there be common ground at all times. That one aesthetic wasn’t necessarily in opposition to the other; that the two could co-exist happily and fruitfully. That the aesthetics could exist not side by side but actually with each other, because they weren’t playing parallel to each other. They were playing deeply within the same moment. And I love that record to this day, because it caused each of those guys and me as well to define the music, to define our ideas about music at that time, on that day.

A: Did that trio ever perform live?
   
S: It did a few casual times.

A: I also realized there were actually two sessions, and they were a year apart. If that is true?

S: I don’t think that’s the case. There were two sessions. What I remember is there was a torrential downpour on the day of the 1st session, just an immense rainfall when we came to the studio in New Jersey, the Savoy Record Studio. The studio was flooded and in fact water had actually gotten into the piano. Water was dripping from the roof…

A: Was that an upright piano? [There is a picture of an upright piano on the front cover of the original LP release.]

S: No, it was a grand. An old and barely serviceable grand. When we arrived at the studio, it was utterly unplayable. It was wet. As was the floor. We turned around and went back to NY. In my recollection, the recording was rescheduled for a week or two later. When we came back, there was the same piano that had then been dried out and retuned. But as you can hear, it was not a good piano. It fell out of tune as the session progressed. But Paul of course didn’t mind this at all. He always treated the piano as a found object. He was interested in exploring whatever the character of the instrument was that he was confronting.

A: At least in those days, it seems. Right? Later when he was older, he preferred really good pianos. But in those days, he seemed to love that.

S: That’s true. In those days, he relished a so-called bad piano. The piano at Gene Smith’s loft was a horrible instrument. At various times, it had missing notes and was abominably out of tune. But Paul loved it, loved dearly to explore that piano. I played with him again in the 1990s and the 2000 noughts. By then his tolerance for bad pianos had lessened.

A: Did he like the creative challenge? Or was it because he had played with Ornette and been exposed to the experience of microtonality? There must have been something that he found challenging, that he loved about it. Or was it an aesthetic question? A notion that went against traditional piano music, as exemplified by Bill Evans’ aesthetic.

S: I think all of what you said contributed to his thinking. He had of course been strongly influenced by Ornette. Ornette played relentlessly sharp to the piano. This was something that wasn’t an issue when Ornette was playing in the context of his own quartet, because Charlie Haden, or whoever the bass player was, was adjusting to Ornette’s pitch. As was Don. But there was definitely… between Ornette and the piano, there was always an extreme rub. I remember Carla telling me that she – in those early days - occasionally played with Ornette as well. Often – she had perfect pitch - and often in the course of playing a blues in F she would switch to a blues in Gb, because that was what her ear demanded of her. So I do think Paul developed a taste for the rub between the frequencies of notes and microtonality. He was also aware of microtonality as an aesthetic unto itself. He had studied briefly at Juilliard and had run into composers who had introduced him to that aesthetic. And it is also true that he was determined to stake out a territory that stood in some opposition to Bill Evans and that kind of piano playing.      
                        
I mean, in that context, the George Russell album Jazz in the Space Age is really interesting, the one with Bill and Paul. There is a kind of study in their differences that appears in the course of that album. It’s a wonderful work.  Again, as was the case with Paul and Pete, I think the opposition between Paul and Bill produced sparks in each of them that was wonderful to behold.

A: Was the friction between Pete La Roca and Paul Bley ever verbalized? Or was it clear anyway that they came from different scenes, had different approaches?

S: It was verbalized softly, sotto voce. There were kind of muttered asides to me by each of them. Each of them was in some way indignant about what the other was doing. Paul was indignant that Pete was so insistent on what he considered outdated values like four-bar phrases and fixed pulse and that kind of stuff. And Pete was indignant that Paul was intent on distorting those values. Distorting I think is maybe an inaccurate word. We touched on this before. Paul was really well-aware of the vernacular of bebop, he played with Charlie Parker, with Mingus and Blakey. He knew well what that vocabulary was and was making a conscious choice to distance himself from that vernacular.

A:  Do you think that at that point he already wanted to break free from playing time, because it seemed that would be the next thing he’d be doing in his trios. He would choose drummers like Paul Motian and Barry Altschul. They would swing but they abandoned playing strict time a lot.

S: I think Paul was in the process of doing that but only in the process. He was spending a lot of his time when he was constructing a beautifully swinging series of eighth notes. He had beautiful eighth notes. When the two of us played duo, a great deal of the time we played a fixed pulse.


A: Listening back to some of the bass solos on Footloose, there is one example, Vashkar, where the bass solo is quite a revelation to me. You open up possibilities for the bass that might have been there before in little seeds or germs but here you are really creating just a texture on the bass with glissandos and slurs or whatever you might call them. It is a really strong (sonic) idea. You are really exploring the instrument sonically and physically, which I haven’t heard elsewhere. It’s going away from playing a function, playing time, chord progressions. You seem to be exploring the instrument as a sound source, and perhaps that also creates a connection to the time when you switched to the electric bass. Not sure if that is related at all. But it might have to do with the feeling of exploring sound on your instrument which was part of the emancipation process of the music at that time.

S: Yes, I do think it was part of the forces in the music at that time. I wasn’t by any means the only person to be asking about the possibilities of my instrument in a very basic way. And I mean to include not just bass players but horn players of all sorts and piano players. I think what we were doing was in the air, it was in the New York City air of that time. It was not confined to the music community at all by any means. The visual arts were experiencing a similar explosion of interest in what was possible on the canvas and outside of the canvas. In fact, I think the visual artists were maybe a little bit ahead of the musicians and even had a strong influence on the musicians. When you look to the roots, for instance, of the Five Spot, the legendary night club that gave Ornette Coleman a home and also gave Monk a home for several months, it was visual artists like Larry Rivers and that community of abstract expressionists in New York City who first congregated at that club and prevailed upon the owners of that club to bring in modern jazz music. There was that kind of interaction within various culture communities in NYC at that time. I think the impulse to break with tradition and explore the basic possibilities in music owes a lot to that impulse having already occurred within the visual arts community.
And at the same time when the Five Spot opened, I was there often to hear Ornette Coleman. Very often sitting right down the bar from me was the poet Leroi Jones who subsequently became Amiri Baraka. There was a substantial New York literary community that was also adjacent to the music community and the visual arts community. We were all drawing inspiration from each other. It was a wonderful place to be at that time.
But as far as the bass playing on Footloose – I think we talked a bit about this previously as well – I felt I was in a wonderful stimulating place on that recording, because Paul Bley was insistent on breaking the forms and extending his line beyond 4-beat bars. Pete La Roca was equally insistent on maintaining those values which gave me the freedom I felt to move in either direction or move between those two impulses. And to attempt to tie them together. That led to the kind of playing on songs like Vashkar.
There is a hint of desperation in that solo. The attempt to reconcile Pete and Paul led to some extreme musical gestures on my part. I was in effect talking to the two of them and urging them that we all find common ground. Which, when you get down to it, is often the role of the bass player on the bandstand anyway.   

A: But it’s also a compositional decision. You play a similar bassline or texture throughout that piece. Then in the solo, you are exploring that even more. I feel that is really an integral part of that version of the piece.

S: I agree entirely. And I think that brings up something that’s very important and dear to my heart which is the role of the composition, in this case Vashkar by Carla Bley.

A: What exactly does the title refer to?

S: Vashkar was a guy, a friend of Paul Haines’.
He was an Indian guy [who had been living] in NYC for a period of time and was a good friend of Paul Haines’ who’d hang out a lot at Paul and Carla Bley’s loft at the time. We all knew him.
There was a kind of element in that piece. There was a kind of deliberate exoticism to that piece when Carla wrote it, the keyword being, I think, compositional. Paul – and this goes back to an insistence within the Jimmy Giuffre Trio, within Jimmy and Paul and me… We were really interested in dispensing with such things as chorus forms, repetitive structures of a certain number of bars. We wanted to abandon those, the traditional armature on which one built a jazz solo.
But on the other hand, we were insistent that the composition had to be honored, the song had to be played. When we were playing Vashkar, we had to play Vashkar. This was a strong response, I felt, to what was happening in the bebop community – which is that one raced through the song, whatever it was, in order to get to I got rhythm changes, 32-bar choruses. Then everybody would take 20 choruses, each without any regard whatsoever to the melody that had begun the song.
So I think Carla Bley’s presence, her unseen presence within our little community and within the trio that made the record Footloose needs to be examined. She had a great deal to do with the music that was being played. My feeling is that my bass solo on Vashkar was my little essay on that song, on Vashkar:
“Here’s my story about Vashkar”. And Paul’s insistence was that that story, that statement about the song be made without the necessity to observe the harmonic progression of the song, the number of bars of the song, even the rhythmic impulse of the song. Everything was up for grabs, but all was to the end of explaining Vashkar, of singing that particular song. So what you get there too, in that bass solo, is my take on musics (sic) outside of jazz music. Music from other parts of the world, for instance. Indian music in all its astonishing complexity and variety was just beginning to make its impact on everybody. The recordings were just beginning to be available. So it’s a very primitive attempt at playing beyond the usual definitions of a jazz music solo, but that’s what it was.        

A: It's really evocative, I think. The story is coming across, whatever the story is.
It’s interesting what you said about non-western music also slowly becoming part of the idiom being used for expression in a jazz context. The piece is obviously a straight eighth piece but not a Latin piece. The form of the piece is also very interesting. I’ve heard a version by Gary Burton where the form itself is being improvised upon. It is a tricky form where the chords change from B to Bb. The Footloose version makes the most sense to me.

S: There is another version by the Tony Williams Lifetime with Larry Young. They kind of fracture the form, they are playing in reference to it. Even the statement of the melody is already a (inaudible)… of the form.
It’s a brilliant version. Carla especially liked Tony Williams’s version of that song.
Larry Young was a remarkable, singular, unique musician.


A: Was the Giuffre Trio happening at the same time, or was that maybe a year before that?

S: That was, I think, contemporaneous. It overlapped.

A: In that trio, you played in time quite a bit, but there are also stretches where it sounds more like chamber music. There are long notes, lots of space. Time is often only implied. I find that group prophetic in a lot of ways. People started playing that way much later, that whole aesthetic became more common later. In comparison, the Footloose trio was still a swinging piano trio but with lots of open possibilities.

S: I think you’re right. I recall specifically… the Giuffre Trio rehearsed a great deal and played not that many gigs, because there wasn’t a demand for the music.

A: There are various recordings from a European tour that were released much later.

S: Hat Hut has a series of radio broadcasts that they’ve issued. They are wonderful. I am very glad they survived. Rehearsing with Jimmy and Paul was… often we hardly played at all. We simply talked about music. The general pattern was we would … Jimmy was forever writing new material for us. And Carla was also writing specifically for us at that time. Often at the beginning of a rehearsal, we would have a new piece, or even two or three new pieces to confront, and we would do that. This was during the last days Paul was willing to read music. He was not an extremely proficient sight-reader; it took him some time to digest a new tune. Subsequently, he just rejected playing written music on principle. But at that time, often the rehearsals began with some works, some actual constructive work on assimilating some new music. Then we would stop and talk about it and talk about what the improvisational possibilities were that were suggested by the tune we had just worked on. Often the discussion would go for a quite long time, and then we would play again for a rather short time, then discuss what we had done and so on. That was a great deal of that... there was that kind of rhythm to the rehearsals.
I remember, in particular, one of the questions we returned to repeatedly was how to play as a trio at a rate of speed without tempo. That is to say, let’s play slow but without tempo or let’s play fast but without tempo. and then let’s examine slow – how many gradations of slow are possible etc etc. That was a theme that we returned to often, to eliminate pulse but to nevertheless play within a rate of speed.
And of course the New York scene was vibrant at that time. We were all aware of Morton Feldman. If we wanted to reference “slow”, we had Morton Feldman to look to. If we wanted to reference “fast”, we had Ligeti. There were all sorts of examples of “fast”, including within the jazz community. There was… Johnny Griffin was at the height of his powers at that time. So examples of “fast” were abundant as well.
But that was something we were insistent…that there were ways of improvising that exceeded the scope of what arose from bebop, of the post-bebop music of that time. And each of us arrived at that point in our own distinct way. Jimmy Giuffre had Four Brothers behind him, and Paul Bley had several years in Montreal as a house pianist for visiting bebop soloists and as a member of the Montreal bebop community – and there was one, there was an active scene.       

A: When you say you were exploring speeds, was that always in the context of a piece? Or would you also improvise, explore these possibilities on their own, detached from a compositional framework?

S: I don’t think there is a clear answer to that, because we were looking everywhere we could for a methodology. But I think Jimmy basically never really relinquished his role as a composer. I think that was a good thing, because he was a remarkable composer, a truly excellent one. His aesthetic was grounded in the idea that there was a composition, and the players were deriving the context of their improvisation from a composition.
I should add that Carla shared this aesthetic. Paul, on the other hand, was not focused on writing music, hadn’t been, never was. He was beginning to explore the idea that he subsequently developed to a far greater extent of beginning with nothing whatsoever, beginning with a clear mind. He was already pushing in that direction. So there was a kind of a push-pull between Jimmy and Paul in that regard as well. A push-pull that stimulated both of them.


A: The question is: does improvisation just mean ‘music without notation’ or is there an imperative to create something new every time? Sometimes it has also grown into that, an ambition that says, “I have to play something new every time”, which can be a bit perverse. I totally understand it. It is also part of my thinking but in fact with much of the music we are talking about, there is also a lot of stuff that is retained in improvisation. That is repeated or that you have been developing over many years or even over the course of a two-week engagement somewhere. You can’t come up with totally new stuff every time, just some of the time.

S: No, you really can’t. My opinion (and it’s just an opinion) is that one can’t. One is doomed to repeat oneself in one way or another but the attempt to do that is a valuable thing. I would hold Paul Bley up as a kind of model for that attitude. To the point where, later in his musical life, he refused to play songs, because they directed him into areas he had experienced before. He refused to discuss what was to be played before a performance, refused to try the piano, refused to do a soundcheck, didn’t want to confront the piano…

A: At a recording also, right?

S: And the same at a recording. He would be obstinate in refusing to do anything but confront the piano as freshly as possible. The piano and the acoustic and the social environment, everything about the occasion he wanted to keep as fresh as possible. Still, one hears repetition in Paul’s playing. Then at the other end of the scale, you got somebody like Miles Davis who clearly developed a vocabulary on Blues in F over a period of forty years. In a sense he was working on the same solo every night for forty years. Miles achieved some glorious results, and Paul Bley did, too. Take your pick. And stand wherever you like within that continuum. It’s the quality of the work you do that matters.


A: On these recordings (the Giuffre 3), you hear a clear relation to jazz but there are also sections where it seems to almost start from zero. There is no given chord structure. Perhaps there is a hint of a tempo suggested by the head, but it is really open – it  could go anywhere. The way you are listening to each other keeps everything together. When people get together nowadays to improvise freely, it often still sounds like that. It comes from that approach.

S: Yes, it does. I agree, and I… Part of what was going on at that time in that trio was that the three of us talked at length about whether it was possible to improvise without reference to tonality. It is deeply embedded in… I think it is safe to say anyone who grows up in a western household hears tonality in the air. It’s in the family’s record collection, it’s on the radio, it’s on the street. The music in the streets, tonality is everywhere. And tonality is also physics. It’s cycles per seconds, it’s cycles interacting with each other, consonance being a unison. And the second greatest consonance being an octave; the third greatest consonance being a fifth and so on. Tonality is... It’s impossible to deny its presence. The question we were asking ourselves and often talking about in rehearsal was: is it possible to improvise without any reference to tonality whatsoever? Jimmy was trying to enable this process by writing atonal music, by deliberately denying the presence of the II-V-I resolution or anything that would suggest that. I remember the Jimmy Giuffre Trio was not alone in exploring this question in New York City at that time. In fact, I remember I was participating in a lovely trio that never played in public with Don Heckman, the alto saxophone player who subsequently became a critic for Los Angeles Times, and John Benson Brooks who was a good friend of George Russell’s who wrote a couple of enduring pop tunes: You Came a Long Way from St Louis, Where Flamingos Fly. He did an interesting album called Alabama Concerto with Art Farmer and Cannonball Adderley. He was a singular musician and a very adventurous one despite having written these pop tunes and all of that. Don Heckman, John Benson Brooks and I got together at Hall Overton’s loft which was in the same building as Gene Smith’s loft. This was the famous loft space in which Thelonious Monk rehearsed his big band for the Town Hall Concert. Which is a wonderful example of Monk’s music orchestrated by Hall Overton. At that loft, on Hall Overton’s piano, the three of us took a tone row that we borrowed from Ernst Krenek’s book on twelve-tone writing, the row that Krenek used as an example throughout the book. Each of us memorized it and memorized the retrograde, and the inversion and the retrograde-inversion and all that and tried doggedly several times to improvise on those rows, to improvise within the context of the 12-tone system. And finally gave it up. We came to the conclusion that we were so inhibited by the presence of these rows and so tied to the specific repetitions of pitches that we had lost our ability to sing our songs.
At any rate, the Giuffre trio was consumed with the idea that we could… explore playing without reference to tonality. I think we were moderately successful at doing so. If you listen to Ornette’s famous and groundbreaking quartet with  Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins and Don Cherry, Charlie is constantly - and I mean without exception - looking for the root pitch in everything that Don and Ornette are playing. And doing so unashamedly. It’s not that he has any question about doing so. He felt - and felt throughout his life, I think – that it was the bassist’s job to justify what was going on above him in terms of tonality, in terms of where is the tonic and, for that matter, where is the downbeat. Charlie was also firmly rooted in explicit time, explicit quarter-note time. And again without shame and without embarrassment.
The Giuffre trio was trying – and it was a monumental job – I know that you’ve spent a lot of time doing the same thing: to deny the presence of a common tonality and what’s going on on the bandstand. It’s very difficult to do and especially difficult to maintain as well, but we were working at it. I would say, too, that Paul was working at it. Aside from the context of the Giuffre trio, when Paul and I played duets, a great deal of the time we would simply start on a head nod without reference to a theme or a common tonality.      
                                         
A: And then you would go into a tune? Or would you just see where the music would take you?

S: Sometimes it would turn out to be How Long Has This Been Going On. And sometimes it wouldn’t. Paul was insistent that that be left to the moment. I think he became ever more insistent on that as the years went on and reached the point where he eliminated references to the American songbook, to Tin Pan Alley, from an entire evening of performance. But at that time, it was inevitably creeping in, I must say.
 
A: Even on his late records – I can’t think of too many recordings where he wouldn’t sneak in some kind of standard chord changes somewhere, where you wouldn’t find at least one piece that wasn’t based on a ballad referencing chord changes such as Lover Man.
Maybe not always the complete song, perhaps just an A section. At times. it can be hard to discern what he exactly was referencing, but I am sure that is not even the point. I am guessing he went back to those materials in his later years. There had been a period when he did electronics and that repertoire didn’t play a role, but he returned to it again, in the 1980s.

S: I believe you are right.  I would also defer to you. I expect you’ve heard more of his late…

A: There is so much of it. I have heard some, but there are so many recordings from his later years.

S: There is a lot of it. He recorded whenever possible.
He believed strongly in leaving as much evidence behind him as he could. I also think he recorded a lot in part to kind of muddy the waters, to make it difficult for people to pin him down, to define him, to discern his identity. I think he thought of himself as a kind of Houdini figure. He was forever trying to surprise the listener. I know that.
I think he was doing so for a good reason. He was really hopeful that he could kind of wake up his audience when he played, wake up the other guys on the bandstand as well. To nudge all of us out of our habits, out of our custom vernacular and all of that.                     

A: There are some moves in his music that are so courageous. Some of his later music could be so beautifully tonal. Then he’d play one note that would explode in your face. He would do that to other musicians as well, apparently to throw them off.
It was remarkable to watch if or how everybody responded or landed back together again, how the music evolved as a consequence to these actions.

S: My experience with Paul was… We played together extensively, daily for a couple of years in the early ‘60s, and then almost not at all for several decades until we reunited in the ‘90s to play again with Jimmy Giuffre.

A; I saw one of those gigs in Germany. Around 1992, was it?

S: Yeah, it was around that time. After the Giuffre trio, I also did several gigs with him, sometimes with Paul Motian, sometimes with Lee Konitz, the players that Paul liked. Paul’s playing had evolved tremendously in the decades between the ‘60s and the ‘90s. What I felt that was needed from me when I reunited with him in the ‘90s was a firm center in my own playing, a firm conviction in my own playing. As you said I think Paul would on occasion operate tactically, play to challenge the note that I played, that defied me to stand firm in my note choice. What he loved was when the player to whom he issued this challenge did indeed stand firm. He loved Lee Konitz’s playing for that reason. Lee was determined to play the note he wanted to play at all costs.
This is, in effect, the opposite of the ideal that is often put forward about the jazz trio where everybody is searching deeply for unison, where everybody is searching for common ground at all times. Paul, I think, stood for something approaching the opposite of that. He stood for constructing a music that withstood challenge; that was, in effect, the result of conflict. On the bandstand with Paul, I often felt I was being challenged. He was, in effect, from the piano bench asking me, “Do you really mean that?” or “Could you possibly mean that?” Then waiting for a response, waiting respectfully for a response. It wasn’t an idle endeavor on his part, it was serious research into possibilities.
                                   
A: So he’d rather not have had you follow him when he changed tonalities or played a note that was outside the tonality or unexpected. Of course it is a skill if you can react immediately and play something appropriate but, if you do that all time, the music can become a game of chasing each other around musically. He’d rather have had you stand your own ground or change, but not to do what he was doing.

S: Yes, I think so. Exactly. One of the first things you learn when you explore playing…when you explore trying to play without context, entirely in the moment, is that the game of chasing each other around the bandstand gets tired very quickly. The limits of that approach become readily apparent. The next step is, as you said, to work carefully on your statement and to look for instances of alliance with the other guys on the bandstand. But by no means to devote your entire energy to finding such alliances. If you do that, it’s at the expense of the integrity of what you’re playing. You are just a cheap whore; you are looking to please everybody.

A: To get back to what you said about Charlie Haden – I think it is an amazing skill to be able to ground Ornette’s music in such a way, in the moment of playing as he did and you did. To find the right bass notes, especially at that time when there was no real precedent for that.
What I love about the Giuffre trio recordings is that all the options seem to be so open. There are instances where Bley is blending beautifully with Giuffre’s long notes, supporting them.  But there are also situations where he seems to be almost ignoring the others, playing independently, sometimes even in a contrarian way. All these options are deployed in such a creative manner.

S: I understand what you are saying and I agree entirely. I think an interesting point that runs parallel to what you just said is Paul’s method for improvising involved, especially in the early time I played with him but even up till the end I think, involved this kind of relationship between his left hand and his right hand. He was very interested in the possibilities of not having his left hand know what his right was doing, and the opposite as well. This was especially apparent to me in the early days when we played I Can’t Get Started or similar standards. Paul loved to allow the melody in his right hand to follow its own imperatives which often led that right hand out of the tonality his left hand was patiently insisting on. I think that was a skill that Paul worked on diligently and methodically in those early years of his development, to be able to cause his left hand to play without distraction the harmonies of eight bars of I Can’t Get Started without the left in any way impeding his right hand from freely exploring the melodies under those five fingers. He relished it when his right hand found itself well beyond the harmonic constraints of his left hand. Almost any other pianist, any other musician for that matter prior to 1960 or the late ‘50s, would have retreated from playing such notes in embarrassment and distress: “Oops, sorry, that was a mistake”. Paul, on the other hand, was delighted when his right hand was able to do that. When his right hand felt emboldened to venture into notes that were distantly related to the tonality his left hand was expressing. He got this technique… he’d heard a lot of contemporary classical music, he’d heard a lot of was going on in New York, let alone the masters of the early 20th century, Webern and Schoenberg and so on. Paul was well-aware of this music and the sound world that it inhabited and really saw possibilities in bringing that sound world into the context of Tin Pan Alley song structures. Eventually the Tin Pan Alley song structures assumed less importance in what he did. But initially, there was this wonderful tension between his left hand and his right hand, let alone between himself and the drummer on the bandstand. Or between himself and Jimmy Guiffre.       

A: He really heard those lines, moving outside of the harmonic context. They follow their own logic. Of course there are discernible motifs, but the lines often sound quite unpredictable. For example, if you compare Bley’s playing to some of the freer recordings of Herbie Hancock at that time, his lines seem much easier to analyze, to pin down. They are more pattern-based, often referring to Slonimsky Thesaurus. Bley’s material seems much more mysterious but there is also a logic to that. At times, his chord voicings sound almost neutral as to create openness for his right-hand lines. On those older recordings, one hardly finds any lush chords à la Bill Evans. Often there are just a few notes in the left hand. The voicings sound quite austere sometimes. I mean I love them.

S: (I think so) They do.
I think you are right, and I think Paul… there is an element of deliberation, of course he is doing that on purpose. He is kind of thinning out the harmonic content in order to maximize the ambiguity of it to disguise the harmonic motion. And I think also that Paul was kind of waging war within himself on his romantic impulse. There is an aspect of Paul’s playing that is kind of lush and rhapsodic. His melodies are sometimes almost too much. They sound like a Doris Day movie – they are sort of nakedly romantic melodies that they rise into the upper register. They are kind of saying, “I love you, I love you”. I think Paul was really bothered by this aspect of his playing and hoped that by eliminating the lushness in the harmonies, his melodic sense would follow and he would kind of rid himself of this romanticism. I think he saw this as a flaw in his playing, especially in his early playing.
On the other hand, sometimes he’d just let it rip. Even in his later work, there were some Doris Day moments in almost everything he played.    

A: That’s a very complex combination of properties, a complex meeting of intentions.

S: Yes, exactly. It is complex in terms of musical content. It’s also complex in terms of psychological content. And I don’t want to… one shouldn’t make too much of that. Psychoanalysis and music are strange bedfellows and should be. And I do think Paul was trying to disguise his impulse to play beautifully – and to suppress it. He wanted his music to be stern and austere. He was a tremendously thoughtful player, and I mean “thoughtful” in the sense of thinking. He was a very smart person and really valued the content of what he played, the note choices. I think he felt that the beauty in his playing was distracting from the intellectual content of it, and he worked overtime to excise the beauty from it, to leave the pure idea exposed.                       

A: Although… a piece like Ida Lupino, that’s a beautiful piece. He played it a lot, he basically owned the piece from all the versions I heard.

S: I think so. The only version I ever heard Carla respond favorably to besides Paul’s was one by Mary Halvorson, the guitar player. There is a remarkable solo recording by Mary of that piece that Carla especially admired.
But I think you are right. I mean till the end when Paul played Ida Lupino, his heart was on his sleeve. He couldn’t help it, and that was a lovely moment in a concert or on a recording.

A: And it is also created a strong contrast to the other material he played in the 60s, the more angular themes: Batterie, Ictus, all those pieces. It is also to Carla’s merit that she created this diverse repertoire…

S: Right, that contained these extremes…

A: It contained pieces that were song-like in a way which no other free recording from that time was offering. She created the context. Ida Lupino is clearly a song but you are not necessarily playing on a chord structure, not even in a tempo, it’s more about a character, an atmosphere…

S: Yeah, exactly. I think Carla’s role in that music at that time has yet to be thoroughly explored. She was very important to the aesthetic of that time.

A: It seemed to be going both ways. The piece Closer has typical Paul Bley chords and maybe even some of his melodies, but she made it into a piece. I don’t know if that’s true, but there are some phrases that sound so much just like him.

S: I agree, it sounds like … and I think there was that interaction between the two of them at that time. They were closely attuned to each other’s musical
methodology and vocabulary and impulses, all of that stuff. It was a remarkable partnership while it lasted. It kind of came apart at the seams after just a few years but it was a remarkable event: her writing and his playing and their benefit to each other.                                

A: I remember a comment that he made somewhere. He said he liked every record he made after 1960 but none of them before. And indeed, by 1960, his playing seemed to have undergone a transformation. When one listens to his first date with Mingus and Blakey and some of his other stuff from the ‘50s, you could say his sound is already there, and some of the harmonic ideas, but he is still trying to sound like a bona fide bebop player. It actually sounds as if he is trying a bit hard… but around 1960, when the two of you started playing together, his time and phrasing became more elastic, flowing, legato. He started making use of overtones, letting notes ring. And it never sounds forced but really free yet swinging. It sounds like he found his personal way of phrasing, of playing time.

S: That’s my observation as well, entirely. I think I was a witness to a couple of years’ worth of his evolution, a couple of critical years in his evolution. The years in which he was able to really shake loose from the tyranny of eighth notes, of endless eighth notes – but not at the expense of rejecting them entirely. He was capable, in the midst of a long event that didn’t involve eighth notes, of all of a sudden playing a succession of them with blinding clarity and absolutely perfect placement and then skittering out of reach again just in a moment, in an instant. I think he was actively pondering all of those issues and really asking himself and asking me, too, because we spent endless time talking. Paul was a raconteur, to say the least. He was really concerned with, on the one hand, the value of eighth- note flow, all of the things that Lester Young and Charlie Parker were able to achieve within the context of eighth-note flow on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the world that lay beyond eighth-note flow, how much more was possible and wasn’t being exploited within the context of so-called jazz music. I think these questions became commonplace; they were asked more often and more insistently as the years went on. But in 1960/61, it was rare to hear those questions voiced and it was courageous to ask them. It was courageous to confront the implications of those questions as well and to begin to try to construct a vocabulary that responded to those questions. I think the question of what to retain on the one hand and what to set aside, to reject on the other hand, is a question that every generation needs to confront. But I think those questions had particular significance and particular effect in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s. That was a kind of pivotal time in the evolution of improvised music, in western improvised music. I am trying to avoid saying jazz, but I don’t want to be very general either because those questions were not being asked within the Latin music community at that time. There were places in which these questions didn’t arise, but they arose in the Loft culture on 6th Ave in New York City in 1960, these questions were loud.   

A: Coming back to the argument with Pete La Roca, there is another quote by Bley, something to the effect of “drummers were the last to give up the constriction of playing time”. He referred to it as “metronomic time” which I find odd considering the abundance of amazing and incredibly sophisticated time players at that time, like Pete La Roca, Roy Haynes or Elvin Jones. None of them were metronomes. Something seems to be left out, a consideration of polyrhythmic complexity, an appreciation of the whole spectrum of variations in phrasing.
But maybe what he wanted was drummers to play time one moment, then discard it the next moment, or something like that?

S: Something like that indeed. At that time, there was a quote from John Cage that we loved dearly. His definition of jazz which he gave in those years was: “Jazz is a monologue to a metronome”.
(laughter)
And you know there is an element of truth in that that is embarrassing to a jazz musician. There is some truth to that. John Cage also said famously, “Beethoven is wrong”. Both of those quotes were important to those of us who were in our small community in NYC at that time. We were kind in opposition to Horace Silver and Art Blakey, as much as we loved that music. Beethoven was wrong in a sense, and jazz is in a sense a monologue to a metronome. And I think there was a generation of drummers finally arising who were examining the same issues that, for instance, the Giuffre Trio was exploring. To me, the most successful of them was Milford Graves. I always felt his... I felt the greatest kinship to his playing, more than to Sunny Murray or Rashied Ali.
It was very comfortable to play with Milford. He was a very welcoming presence on the bandstand. He had a beautiful touch, a lovely touch. I think there were many players who were kind of put off by Paul’s methodology, by his note choices, and by his insistence on playing outside of constraints that had been taken for granted before. But they were just seduced by his sound on the piano. How could this guy be bad when he played the instrument so beautifully? When he produced a sound that would just break your heart? He had always had that, and Milford did, too. He had the loveliest touch imaginable. And implicit in that kind of beautiful touch is a regard for the human voice. Implicit in the regard for the human voice is a regard for utterance, for language, for speech rhythms or for language structure, for subjects and verbs and predicates and paragraphs and chapters, all of that stuff. You open that door and there are a wealth of references to use in constructing a personal language, a personal methodology in order to play improvised music.                        
I mean Paul loved Paul Motian as well, and Paul also had a very nice touch. When all was said and done his playing could be wildly eccentric and sometimes even childlike. But his touch was all through, everything he played was really remarkable.

A: And his time feel as well…

S: Yeah.

A: One thing that comes back time and again in Paul Bley interviews is the fact of how much he rejected practicing.
And I understand it’s something he decided to stop doing for himself at a certain point, but it sounds like he felt anybody propagating the importance of practicing was wrong. Which is a pretty extreme position to take.
A lot of other players talk at length, down to the most minuscule of details, about how they worked on their sound and honed their craft. But this didn’t seem of any importance to Paul Bley. It might have been tongue in cheek, the way he said it. On the other hand, his music is so detailed that I guess he did practice earlier in his life. Or he didn’t need to as much and stopped at some point. It’s hard to tell.

S: Yeah, I wonder, too. I know of his interdictions regarding practicing, his insistence that developing players should never practice. There is a bit of a smile on his face as he says these things. But I should also add that by the time I came to him, he was about 10 years older than I was. When I came to New York, I was 20, he was in his early 30s. He was a bit more than 10 years older. We were … I think it’s true to say without reservation that we were involved in music all day, but there was barely time to practice. It was a time when jobs, if you were lucky enough to have one, lasted from 9 o’ clock at night until 3 in the morning. That’s an intensive six hours of playing right there.
There was a circuit of jam-session venues available at all times, some of them involved public – small clubs that threw their bandstands open to whomever wanted to use them. But most of them were private circumstances like Gene Smith’s loft, and many other lofts in downtown NY and throughout the city and Brooklyn and Queens. What Paul was doing, and what he brought me into doing as well, was constantly circulating from one jam-session environment to another one until there was a job and then playing the job. Sitting in his loft, hosting young players like myself and discussing the ramifications of playing jazz music endlessly was also a big part of Paul’s daily involvement in music. I’d never heard anybody so eager to discuss the music, to dissect its possibilities and to explore its possibilities by speech. That kind of verbal articulation and articulateness persisted throughout Paul’s life. He must have enjoyed teaching at New England Conservatory, must have enjoyed getting paid to expound to an endless procession of young kids.
But I am describing all of this to say that Paul’s life in music, his involvement in music was so intensive from minute to minute, there was no time to practice. He was too busy doing other things but they were things that involved music intensely.       
In much of what he said, there was some sly humor at play. But he really valued thinking about music. He felt deeply that music could change as a result of constructive thought. And if you were practicing, you weren’t thinking – you  were in effect subjecting your fingers to modes of discipline.

A: I guess it depends on what you are practicing…

S: Yeah, it depends, indeed… or exploring the possibilities of a G7th, but then Paul would jump on you and ask you, “Suppose there is no G7, then what?” He would immediately draw you away from your instrument into an abstract discussion of music’s possibilities. This was a tremendously fruitful approach for him.

A: I guess he’d rather just do it on stage. There would be preparation in the form of a process of thinking and discussion, and then there would be a fresh manifestation on stage. No need to even play the music in a rehearsal, just to do it as the next step in front of people, which has a different tension to it, a different necessity.

S: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I can’t think what to add to that. What you just said is correct, I think. The very first time I played with Paul Bley was in 1959, and I was still a student at university and I had no idea who Paul Bley was. Through a series of intermediaries, I agreed to play a concert with him. When I showed up for the soundcheck, I asked him what we were going to play, and he said, “I don’t know.” That was just astonishing to me, I had never encountered that before. I kind of persisted… As the gig grew nearer, I still had no idea what was going to go on; I persisted in asking him in countless ways what we were going to play, but he insisted on diverting that question. In 1959, that was astonishing. When we finally got to play, I realized that I was up on the stage with the bass in my hands and expected to play the thing. But when it came down to play, that feeling of panic just dissolved. The first note I played sounded so good that I played a second note and it sounded even better, so I tried a third. And so on.
It was one of those magical nights where it seemed I couldn’t hit a wrong note. Everything shifted underneath me. My playing was never the same after that night. I owe Paul for that revelatory experience. In fact, I went back to university and quit and moved to New York to play music.
It changed everything. I am forever grateful to Paul for that.