Evidence
1997
Hands On
About This Album
Besides Paul Bley's usual philosophizing in the liner notes (this time with Down Beat writer Kirby Dean) -- or should I say illustrating his sophistry philosophically -- this solo piano set, played on a Bösendorfer Imperial piano, is one of Bley's most intimate and moving in the last 20 years. Playing a program consisting entirely of his own material, the pianist shows listeners how it's done without repeating himself. There are few others -- among the living -- who practice the art of jazz pianistically who can make this claim: Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill, Ran Blake, Misha Mengelberg, Marilyn Crispell, Matthew Shipp, and Irène Schweizer are the only ones who come to mind besides Bley. Many of his styles are present here, and some new methodologies he's brought to light in the last few years, but his most unsettling trademark, the one that makes each of his solo compositions and improvisations into works of art, is his use of space. The first three tracks here, "Remembering," "Points," and "Rain Dance," are all meditations on space and harmonic reductions -- how to reduce any melodic idea, no matter how elaborate, by using newly shaped or architecturally altered chords created only from scalar essences.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4 and 5)

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