Play Blue documents a rare solo concert by the Canadian pianist Paul Bley, recorded at the Oslo Jazz Festival in August 2008. Bley first approached the solo medium on ECM with Open, To Love, one of the defining records of unaccompanied jazz piano. He returned to it more than three decades later with Solo in Mondsee. In Oslo, before an attentive and enthusiastic Norwegian audience, he shapes music in the moment and plays his own compositions.
The concert took place at the Kulturkirken Jakob, one of the festival venues. Jan Erik Kongshaug recorded it, and in October 2013 he mixed it at Rainbow Studio with Manfred Eicher, who produced the album, released more than five years after the concert. The programme has four long Bley compositions and one encore, averaging about eleven minutes a piece. As the New York Times once put it, Bley's music "isn't quite free jazz" and "runs on a mixture of deep historical knowledge and its own inviolable principles".
Far North, just over seventeen minutes, opens the concert and moves through many moods. Sparse, almost Morse-like phrases give way to dense clusters and lyrical motifs, and the piece stops abruptly on a dark, resonant chord. The Way Down South Suite picks up that darkness, turns to free-flowing rising chords, briefly hints at an Appalachian-style melody and passes through a false ending. The encore is Pent-Up House by Sonny Rollins, in whose band Bley played in the early 1960s. He states the theme plainly, then takes it apart cell by cell while keeping its fragments recognisable.
S. Victor Aaron of Something Else Reviews heard in 2014 "an unfiltered manifestation of Bley's genius", and found the set distinct from his other albums although built from the same elements. Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews described Flame as an intimate ballad and Longer as the densest track of the five. Bley himself told his biographer Arrigo Cappelletti that he had tried "to maintain all the advances of jazz" while adding the ability to play them all free.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2373, first released on 28 March 2014.
