Time Will Tell is the first recorded meeting of the Canadian pianist Paul Bley and the British saxophonist Evan Parker. By then each of them had been playing improvised music for some thirty-five years, in very different circles. The American bassist Barre Phillips, who had worked with both, completes the trio. Recorded in Oslo in January 1994 and released by ECM a year later, it is a free improvisation session with a chamber music sense of space and restraint.
Each of the three had a long history with the label. Parker appeared on ECM's fifth release in 1970 with the Music Improvisation Company, and Bley's 1972 solo album Open, to Love did much to define the label's early sound. Phillips, a Californian living in the south of France since the early 1970s, made his ECM debut in 1971 with Music for Two Basses, a duo with Dave Holland. The session took place at Rainbow Studio with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and was produced by Steve Lake, who also wrote the liner notes. All eleven pieces are credited jointly to the players.
The disc alternates seven trio pieces with four duos. It opens with Poetic Justice, a slow, meandering trio improvisation of over seventeen minutes. On Above The Tree Line Parker's soprano floats over Phillips's bass, and Bley's chords carry a faint Ravel colour. In Sprung Parker turns to the circular-breathing soprano lines he is known for, and the music takes on a nervous, crowded agitation. The four duos split the trio into its possible pairings, two of them for saxophone and bass alone, which gives Phillips room to show his extended techniques.
Writing in 2001, Ken Waxman of Jazzword called the album "lavishly praised" and noted that its success "set new standards of literate blending". Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews heard "something grandly intimate" in its fleeting statements. Two years later the session led to the trio's first tour, and a concert from it at the Propstei Sankt Gerold in the Austrian Alps became the follow-up album Sankt Gerold.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1537, first released in January 1995.
