On Trios Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard and Steve Swallow revisit five Bley compositions from different decades, two single tunes and three suites. The drummerless trio had then been playing together for about twenty years. It was the first new Bley album issued on ECM itself, rather than on WATT, the ECM-distributed label that had been her main home for some forty years. It was also the first time she gave the direction of a recording to a producer, Manfred Eicher.
Bley plays piano, Sheppard tenor and soprano saxophones, and Swallow electric bass. The album was recorded in April 2012 in the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due, with Stefano Amerio as engineer. Eicher chose the pieces. Swallow had been playing Bley's music since the early 1960s and had toured in all her bands since 1978, while Sheppard had been a regular partner since 1987. The trio had recorded before, on Songs With Legs.
Utviklingssang, Norwegian for "development song", opens the set with a folk-like melody first recorded on Social Studies in 1980. Vashkar is the oldest tune here, known to many from Paul Bley's Footloose of 1963, on which Swallow also played. In this version Sheppard's soprano leads while Swallow's sparse bass holds the line. Les Trois Lagons was commissioned by the Grenoble Jazz Festival and premiered there by the trio in 1996, its three parts named after plates in Henri Matisse's cut-out book Jazz. The last section opens on a climbing figure of block chords from Bley that the others take up. Wildlife, first heard on Night-Glo in 1985 with synthesizers and brass, and The Girl Who Cried Champagne complete the programme.
In the Daily Telegraph, Ivan Hewett called the album "an endearing blend of sophistication and whimsy". He noted a nod to Ravel's Boléro in Vashkar and to Monk's harmony in Les Trois Lagons. Steve Harris wrote in Hi-Fi News that the trio's empathy had never been better captured, with "Sheppard's saxophone as communicative as a human voice". In DownBeat, James Hale found that the approach lets light into unfamiliar corners of well-worn pieces.
CD edition, ECM 2287, first released in September 2013.
