Paul Bley was born in Montreal in 1932 and left for New York at the start of the 1950s. He had already taken over Oscar Peterson's chair at the Alberta Lounge as a teenager. In December 1987 he came home, sat down at Studio Tempo, and recorded ten improvisations for a local label that was then four years old.

Solo was the first of the dozen or so records Bley made for Jim West's Justin Time over the next twenty years, a run that ended with About Time in 2008. It is also a digital recording from the first years of the CD, close and dry, quite different from the Oslo sound of Open, to Love, the 1972 ECM record that defined his solo playing.

All ten pieces are credited to Bley, and the titles say how plainly he approached the date: Forth, Conversations, Blueness, Boogie, Strolling, Six Eight. The blues is the common thread. It is never played straight. Bley works as he always did, starting a phrase, leaving it, and coming back to it from another key, with silence doing as much of the work as the notes. Most tracks stay under five minutes. The closing Six Eight runs to nine.

Japanese CD edition from Solid's Justin Time series, remastered.