Paul Bley, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian

Memoirs reunites the pianist Paul Bley with two old friends, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian, in a single day of recording in Milan in July 1990. Soul Note released it in 1992. The ten pieces come from all three players and from two composers close to them, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, and the disc runs about seventy minutes.

The trio recorded on 20 July 1990 at Mondial Sound in Milan, with Alessandro Radici engineering and Giovanni Bonandrini producing. Bley wrote the title track and Insanity; Haden contributed Dark Victory, New Flame and Blues For Josh; Motian brought This Is The Hour, Sting A Ring and Enough Is Enough. Monk is represented by Monk's Dream and Coleman by Latin Genetics, a reminder that Bley and Haden had played together with Coleman in Los Angeles at the end of the 1950s. Doug Simpson, writing in Audiophile Audition in 2014 on the box of Bley's complete Black Saint and Soul Note recordings, heard "a delicious dialogue between the trio members". He singled out a swinging Monk's Dream, the South American lilt of Latin Genetics and the slower, sparser Dark Victory and This Is The Hour, "where Motian's sculpted percussion shadows Bley's decisive notes" while Haden places a few bass notes and silences. Among the bolder pieces he counted Motian's Sting A Ring.

This CD is SNGG005-2 in the Golden Gems series of CAM Jazz, issued on Soul Note in November 2016 with remastered audio in a card sleeve with the original colour booklet. The album first came out in 1992 as 121240-2.