Ray Anderson, Mark Helias, Gerry Hemingway

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Same three men, no leader listed, which is the whole point. By the late eighties Ray Anderson, Mark Helias and Gerry Hemingway had stopped being a trombone trio and become BassDrumBone, a collective that shares the writing and gives every instrument equal claim on the foreground. You Be is the sound of that democracy working: Helias' compositions leaning towards long singing bass lines, Hemingway building drum parts that are structures rather than accompaniment, Anderson slipping between blues holler and pure abstraction sometimes inside a single phrase. Three decades of playing together started somewhere, and this is a very good place to hear the machinery still being built.

Original pressing on Minor Music, the German label that documented a good deal of the New York downtown scene when nobody else was bothering. Increasingly hard to find.